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

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.

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

You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.

I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.

The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged.

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.