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.

Young writers only take off when they find their subjects. Since almost everyone has a family and stories about family, that is often a place to start.

If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.

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.

We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people.

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.

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