The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

Neither of my parents has been very sensitive about my writing.

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

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.

It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.

One of the most powerful devices is to distort time, to go from human time to atomic time, geologic time. Sometimes you can actually accomplish that, with one unexpected word choice.

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.