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

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

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

You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.

Young writers only take off when they find their subjects. Since almost everyone has a family and stories about family, that is often a place to start.

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.

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.