I considered going to film school; I took a course in film and was very interested in filmmaking as well as film writing.

I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess.

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.

Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.

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.

A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.

Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.