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

Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.

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

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

The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.

The Black Mountain poet I like most is the early Creeley. Those early poems seem very lyrical and very traditional, with a lot of voice and character.

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