It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.
From Robert Morgan
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.
Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.
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.
Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.
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.
If people associate me with a region, that's fine with me.
With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.
Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.
Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.
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