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

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

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

One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime.

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

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

Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.