My goals as an artist have nothing to do with speaking to an audience. I love to have a good time, but when it comes to poetry I'm not really interested in writing poetry that seeks to entertain or operate safely within the mainstream and, to be clear, I'm not disparaging the really phenomenal work that does - it's just not my interest as a poet.

I once asked Myung Mi Kim where gender is located in her work, and she said simply, "it's everywhere," resisting the notion that gender needs to be overly inscribed into the text with some kind of message. Hers is the kind of work that has most influenced how I make poetry - the idea that we don't need to enclose or nail down gender or race, for that matter.

I think the occupation of my poetry is akin to this desire to be many things at once - things that sometimes conflict. Regarding how the quotidian makes its way into the work, it's all of it, in a way. Like, when I'm writing poems, I'm just picking up scraps of whatever is happening around me - a geographical location, a love affair failed, the day the air felt like rope.

The precise laziness is akin to letting your eyes blur or glimpsing what's at the corners in peripheral vision. Or those moments when you think you see something but you're not sure you actually saw it in the end. The way I get to these places is just practice, like a kind of meditation that shapes my brain.

For me, a lot of Discipline was very personal writing, like writing through and working out being inside this gendered body and also the compulsions of the body, the muting of the mind as driven by the body. My father had died some years ago so he haunts the book too, just floats through it ghost-like. But, the writing of every book is different for me. They are so like living creatures, these books, so I don't know what's carried over into the writing of the next things - except maybe that I'm best when I make my writing practice a routine.

I often feel trapped. I often feel like I'm trying to escape some trap, be it a way of thinking, a compulsion, or a way of life. I believe this persistent feeling comes from childhood traumas that stripped away my power. The effect, though, the resulting persistent desire to stretch out of confinement even when confinement is inevitable, is a gift.

My goals as an artist have nothing to do with speaking to an audience. I love to have a good time, but when it comes to poetry I'm not really interested in writing poetry that seeks to entertain or operate safely within the mainstream and, to be clear, I'm not disparaging the really phenomenal work that does - it's just not my interest as a poet.