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 val….

A lot of my students are Asian-American, and it has been thrilling to watch them break through the stereotypes into something alive and surprising..

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..

It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elem….

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead en….

If people associate me with a region, that's fine with me..

Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's tim….

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in ver….

Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there..

If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorabl….

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..

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

What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it..

Neither of my parents has been very sensitive about my writing..

Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems..

The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are ne….

One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century pass….

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..

I have taught students from the New York City area so long I have a special affinity and rapport with them. It surprises me sometimes that there are ….

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

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