Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity.

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.

Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle.

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

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.

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.

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