A Lot Of My Students Are Asian-american,

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

I Write As A Way Of Keeping Myself Going. You Build Your Life Around Writing, And It's What Gets You Through. So It's Partly Just Curiosity To See What You Can Do.

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.

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 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.