It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.
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.
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.
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.
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 love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.
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.
Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.
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 new.
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.
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.
I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.
The Black Mountain poet I like most is the early Creeley. Those early poems seem very lyrical and very traditional, with a lot of voice and character.
If people associate me with a region, that's fine with me.
I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.
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.
Neither of my parents has been very sensitive about my writing.
Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle.
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.
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 don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.
I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.
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.
Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.
I considered going to film school; I took a course in film and was very interested in filmmaking as well as film writing.
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