Fiction Is About Intimacy With Characters, Events,

Maybe The Example Of Southern Fiction Writing Has Been So Powerful That Southern Poets Have Sort Of Keyed Themselves To That.

Neither Of My Parents Has Been Very Sensitive About My Writing.

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 Writer Has To Draw Blood.

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 Poetry In Translation.

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 Though It Were Vast.