Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.

Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.

I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.

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.

Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.

A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.

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.