It's true, there aren't many explicit references to Canada in my book. And not many explicit references to the U.S., either. I try to fill my poems with enough real, observed detail that the poems create a believable world - but I don't write poems for the sake of telling my own story. My life is not important or interesting enough to warrant that kind of documentary. Instead I try to use my experience as a way of understanding situations that are common to many people. I want readers to project their own lives onto my poems.

I think that being mindful of your own biases tends to lead you into ambiguity, not clarity, and that following those ambiguities is the only way to approach the universal.

I do own CDs by Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and Joni Mitchell, but I don't think of them as being major influences on my writing.

I'm a mix; I'm sure some of my Canadian friends find me very American, both in person and on the page.

Poetry isn't an efficient tool for preserving experience, any more than it's an efficient mode of communication, but who says that it should be efficient?

And treating poetry as a performing art emphasizes its ephemerality. A printed poem can be endlessly reprinted, photocopied, scanned, uploaded, cut and pasted - but a performance, even if somebody's there with a video camera, is one time only: the audience experiences something that won't exist when the performance is over, and which won't ever be reproduced in exactly the same form. I find that appealing.

I don't think I'd ever get any better as a poet if I didn't push myself, very deliberately, to grow. My best poems surprise me, as they should, but I fight them at every turn, possibly just because I'm stubborn.