Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle.
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.
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.
Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.
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 memorable.
I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.
The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
