My revision methods are chipping things away and moving them around and trying to get things right. I'm also open in my own writing to failure. I want to fail. I want to go to a place where I don't know what I'm doing, where maybe I'm lost. And in that uncertain space, I make decisions, and I know all those decisions are going to change everything else. And at a certain point, you just come to a place of rest. In revising, you reduce your options so that nothing is possible, and you just think, I can't change this anymore because I've already passed that decision point.

Campion is a poet who knows that what a poet sees is nothing without a mixture of formal prowess and emotional insight.

I exaggerate. I oversimplify. I generalize. But there’s no cynicism here. American poetry is a mess. Long live American poetry.

I think I did experience culture shock. When I first arrived in Boston, I was basically told to go home. "Homeboy" is what they called me - very funny. I didn't take offense. I just thought, This is exactly where I want to be. The pace was different. Houston is a sprawling city. Boston is just crammed into the size of a postage stamp.

Poetry is an art spoken, as if sung, in relation to other human beings.

American poetry is a mess. Long live American poetry.

I'm not going to tell people how to write, but we do have a skill set, and the more we put ourselves out into the world as poets, as a sort of poet of the tribe, as representatives of metaphor, and try to claim space for metaphor in the inner life, that's going to be important and be helpful to poetry and bring a tension for poets writing about whatever they choose.