It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.

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.

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

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.

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.

Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.

With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.