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.

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

I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.

A lot of my students are Asian-American, and it has been thrilling to watch them break through the stereotypes into something alive and surprising.

Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.

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

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