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.

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.

I considered going to film school; I took a course in film and was very interested in filmmaking as well as film writing.

I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.

I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess.

I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.

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