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

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

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

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.

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

I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.