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.

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

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.

I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.

Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.

Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity.

Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.