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.

I think the grotesque can inspire intimacy (it draws us in) as well as awe, like the cabinets of curiosities.

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

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.

I tend to view the superstitions or fragments of myth as triggers for lyric inquiry. I also find I think of this kind of language as ars poetica - if we can find the right combination of words, we can make something improbably or extraordinary happen.

I'm a compulsive enjamber. I'm drawn to half-meanings created by the line, so that's definitely an element of craft that's always on my mind. And I'm a big devotee of the short line, of couplets and tercets, and of irregular stanzas with lots of white space. I've got to give the dense language room to breathe!

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.