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

I considered going to film school; I took a course in film and was very interested in filmmaking as well as film writing.

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

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.

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.

I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.

The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged.