Because I love narrative but am more lyrically inclined, I've learned that if I freight titles with narrative information (the who, what, when, where, why of the poem), I can get to my main interest, which is the language, and where it wants to take me. If I can establish the poem's occasion in the title, then so much the better for my freedom to associate.

My obsessions tend to cluster, so I often have families of poems in which only a couple of them make it to the book. It can be satisfying to banish poems to my "crappy poems" file.

Many of the poems weave autobiographical elements with fabular or mythic materials.

I tend to employ braided narrative threads in the lyric, so often echoes (of phrases or images) will occur and will hit my ear so I can shape different resonances and shifts in tone.

I prefer assonance and internal rhyme to end rhyme. I mean, the sonnet already looks like a box. Best not to get too boxed in, though.

Many of the poets I most admire have a way of embodying their peculiar obsessions via landscape that can sometimes seem magical.

I tend to gravitate toward the realm of superstition (cures and such) and odd scientific facts (like bioluminescent shrimp and fistulated cows). I like the intimacy that I often find in the grotesque.