Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.
If people associate me with a region, that's fine with me.
In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.
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.
Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.