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.

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

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

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.

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

If people associate me with a region, that's fine with me.

The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.