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

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.

Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.

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

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.

I encourage students to pursue an idea far enough so they can see what the cliches and stereotypes are. Only then do they begin to hit pay dirt.

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.