I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.
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.
A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.
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 considered going to film school; I took a course in film and was very interested in filmmaking as well as film writing.
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.
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.
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.
I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale.
Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.
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.
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.
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.
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 verse.
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.
It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.
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.