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

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 thoug….

We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people..

Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts..

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….

What language shall I borrow To thank Thee, dearest Friend, For this, Thy dying sorrow, Thy pity without end? O make me Thine forever, And should I f….

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 doin….

I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it's what gets you through. So it's partly just curiosity to see wh….

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

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,….

I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction..

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..

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 p….

Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity..

Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places..

Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry..

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later..

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..

I tell students they will know they are getting somewhere when a scene is so painful they can just barely bring themselves to write about it. A write….

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form..