Your poetry is also very conscious of nature. Why does nature still inform so much poetry? Do you think natural imagery will eventually lose relevancy as people move further from (or continually overtake and urbanize) the natural world?

My father was a genuine woodsman and, though he hunted them, he loved animals and their world much more than the small talk of offices and stores and houses. I took in some of that as much by osmosis as anything else. He also taught me about plants and creatures, brought me wild pets — a baby skunk, a baby raccoon to raise. We had a pet cardinal who would come to the screen door to be let in at night. My grandfather took me on long walks into forested land behind his house. He taught me to call owls. I was an only child and spent much of my time wandering around collecting things from outdoors. I was close enough to the natural world to see it as farm kids do. And everything we ate was raised at home, then smoked and canned or preserved or pickled.

The term ‘nature poet’ is offensive. All poets are nature poets, even if their testament is to the city sprawl and shifting cultures laid over the earth by humankind, a species that is also, in spite of itself, part of and subject to what we refer to as “nature,” that which we generally objectify or anthromorphize or ignore.

If that is a gone world, and it is gone — but whether in the form I knew or a New England snowy wood, a Kansas plain, a rainforest, or a wild coastline — it remains the only ground of being we have. The term “nature poet” is offensive. All poets are nature poets, even if their testament is to the city sprawl and shifting cultures laid over the earth by humankind, a species that is also, in spite of itself, part of and subject to what we refer to as “nature,” that which we generally objectify or anthromorphize or ignore.

Do I think imagery from the natural world will disappear from poetry? No, but there will be, is already, less of it. Fewer people know the language — for it is a language: the texture of a leaf, the way wet chickens smell like ashes, the way a dead animal’s carcass seeps slowly into a forest floor, the way the owl’s call parses distance. So things will change, and then they’ll come round again, perhaps not gently but certainly. The poets will write it all down, as they have always done, even if nobody reads it, and nature won’t disappear from anything, however we might think we wish it would.

James Dickey — What was he like? Has his poetry been important to your work?

I did know James Dickey slightly. I knew his work very well. Especially the poems written between 1957 and 1967. Almost all his poems afterward pale in comparison with the work of that one ten-year period. I have said this before, but Dickey’s work gave me a kind of permission to write about the South I knew.

I never connected much to the poems of the Fugitives, except for Robert Penn Warren, who was the most daring and the closest to the ground, so to speak. Reading Dickey’s poems as they came out in the journals was a revelation. I read Dickey and Roethke intensely at around the same time. Both of them mattered to me very much. Dickey’s south was a place I knew; his way of merging with the land and its creatures was something I knew. He was nothing like Ransom, whose poems reminded me of the ornately carved marble-topped tables in my grandmother’s Victorian house, or Tate or the other philosophers of that group. Dickey’s poems were not like anybody’s, unless one imagines a Gerard Manley Hopkins with a huge ego, a southern accent, and a tacky cowboy hat.