One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person.
You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.
I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.
I have taught students from the New York City area so long I have a special affinity and rapport with them. It surprises me sometimes that there are students from anywhere else.
Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.
The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.
We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people.
What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it.
A lot of my students are Asian-American, and it has been thrilling to watch them break through the stereotypes into something alive and surprising.
Young writers only take off when they find their subjects. Since almost everyone has a family and stories about family, that is often a place to start.
The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged.
Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle.
Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.
Neither of my parents has been very sensitive about my writing.
Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.
In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.
I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.
If people associate me with a region, that's fine with me.
I encourage students to pursue an idea far enough so they can see what the cliches and stereotypes are. Only then do they begin to hit pay dirt.
I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.
I considered going to film school; I took a course in film and was very interested in filmmaking as well as film writing.
Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.
The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.
I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.
In the late 60s and early 70s, I did get interested in voices, and in narration and embodying the voice, making the poem sound like a real person talking.
