The Black Mountain poet I like most is the early Creeley. Those early poems seem very lyrical and very traditional, with a lot of voice and character.

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.

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.

The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged.

With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.

Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.

When you have an idea for a story, you want those characters to reach as many people as you can. I think you normally think of prose as a way of doing that. It fits our time, the culture.