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

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

Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

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

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.