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.
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 young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.
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.
I love chapbooks. They're in some ways the ideal form in which to publish and read poems. You can read 19 poems in a way you can't sit down and read 60 to 70 pages of poems.
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.
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 timeless, that it reaches back.
In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.
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 end.
I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.
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.
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, with one unexpected word choice.
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 students from anywhere else.
Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.
I considered going to film school; I took a course in film and was very interested in filmmaking as well as film writing.
With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.
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.
