The environment is becoming so much a central concern, I see environmental concerns just bleeding into poetries all over the place. My hope is that we won't have these environmental poets tucked over here and everybody else doing cool stuff with language and consciousness elsewhere, but that all of it will become one thing.

I like to use research to enlarge the poem. And sometimes a rhetorical or syntactical gesture stitches the poem along.

Earth's immune system - its rapid response team of self-protection - becomes invigorated at times of peril. And one sees it at play now in the upwelling of grassroots work aimed at finding a sustainable future.

I do think that the long poem speaks for an inner need for continuity. We live in a time of so many losses, disruptions, and distractions, that the need for a sense of the ongoing is quite real. The long poem is very satisfying in offering the psyche a model of coherence.

I like the dance between sustained focus and digression that the long poem invites. A controlling metaphor helps to sustain the long poem.

I'm just really interested in the interface of the individual with the collective. I think that's where the arts live.

I'm really interested in culture because it is such a powerful human force, particularly in America where we think it's all about the individual.