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

Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.

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

Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

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.

When you have an idea for a story, you want those characters to reach as many people as you can. I think you normally think of prose as a way of doing that. It fits our time, the culture.

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.