I tell students they will know they are getting somewhere when a scene is so painful they can just barely bring themselves to write about it. A writer has to draw blood.

One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person.

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.

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

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.

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.