My dad, a mathematician, raised me to believe that mathematics is beautiful, so math is a part of my imaginative terrain. In my late 20s I wrote several 11-line poems because I wanted to create poems that couldn't be uniformly divided into couplets, tercets, or quatrains, 11 being a prime number.

As a species, we create tools to control our environment. What excites my imagination is wilderness: our materials' ability to escape our control.

William Shakespeare tried hard to see every facet of every question, probably because he was more interested in questions than in answers. That's a big part of what makes him great, in my opinion.

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

When you recite you're giving a performance, in the way that an actor or a singer performs, and some poets are not interested in doing that, maybe because they're writing for a readership as opposed to an audience, or because they see poetry as a very private art.

When I started reciting my own poems in public, I worried that it would seem too theatrical, but now I find recitation very natural, because it allows me to address audiences directly.

Our analytical faculties allow us to look critically at our writing and interpret it. Sometimes we make bold, impulsive edits to our poems, but most forms of precision and economy in poetry, it seems to me, are signatures of the analytical mind.