Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass "conceptualism" that repeats vanguard gestures of the past minus the politics and historical context.

In art and life we're always reading bodies and behaviors (and skies and skylines or whatever), constructing brief and shifting coherences, and I guess I want to capture that process of characterization and re-characterization instead of offering up a few stable, easily-summarized individuals.

The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.

I'm trying to be somebody on whom the experience is lost by supplanting it with its telling. I definitely do that in medical contexts, even in trivial ones.

If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.

When I was a kid and we played baseball we used to use that "eye black" stuff sometimes - that kind of grease you put under your eyes to reduce glare or something. We only used it, of course, to look cool; it's not like we were any better prepubescent athletes for reducing glare.

I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.