I tell students they will know they are getting somewhere when a scene is so painful they can just barely bring themselves to write about it. A writer has to draw blood.
The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.
Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it's what gets you through. So it's partly just curiosity to see what you can do.
Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.
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.
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.
I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.
The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.
I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.
