Neither Of My Parents Has

I Seem To Keep Returning To My Father In Poems Because His Personality Was So Extreme, So Driven. He Did Everything To Excess.

With Prose You Can Incorporate More Details, Develop Scenes, Sustain The Tension In A Special Way. Prose Has Its Own Speed.

It Was Less A Literary Thing Than A Linguistic, Philosophical Preoccupation... Discovering How Far You Can Go With Language To Create Immediate, Elementary Experience.

Philip Larkin Has A Tough Honesty And Sense Of Humor That I Find Irresistible, As A Contemporary Poet.

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