When I wrote I took on the role of the despondent and difficult to understand person. Whereas in life, I was easy to understand, to the point of being simple-minded maybe.

All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

Another trouble with poetry - and I'm gonna stop the list at two - is the presence of presumptuousness in poetry, the sense you get in a poem that the poet takes for granted an interest on the reader's part in the poet's autobiographical life, in the poet's memories, problems, difficulties and even minor perceptions.

I try to presume that no one is interested in me. And I think experience bears that out. No one's interested in the experiences of a stranger - let's put it that way. And then you have difficulty combined with presumptuousness, which is the most dire trouble with poetry.

By clarity I don't mean that we're always in kind of a simple area where everything is clear and comforting and understood. Clarity is certainly a way toward disorientation because if you don't start out - if the reader isn't grounded, if the reader is disoriented in the beginning of the poem, then the reader can't be led astray or disoriented later.

Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there's no visual distraction.

Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.