The Great Watershed Of Modern Poetry Is

Some People Want To Call Me An Appalachian Writer, Even Though I Know Some People Use Regional Labels To Belittle.

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.

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.

I Think That It's More Likely That In My 60s And 70s I Will Be Writing Poetry Rather Than Fiction.

One Of The Most Powerful Devices Is To Distort Time, To Go From Human Time To Atomic Time, Geologic Time. Sometimes You Can Actually Accomplish That, With One Unexpected Word Choice.