I wrote the poems in Charms Against Lightning one by one, over almost a decade, and I did not write them toward any theme or narrative. But once I really got serious about putting together a book, I began to see that in fact there were themes across the poems, if only because my own obsessions had brought me back time and again to the same ground. I realized that any ordering of the poems would determine how those themes developed over the manuscript, and how the collection's dramatic conflicts were resolved.

When I'm most deeply involved in my writing, sometimes I do dream about poetry, and occasionally I wake up from a dream with a phrase that I like well enough to put it in a poem.

In my case, performance is part of the medium. Sometimes I feel that it's my main medium, and that the presentation of my poems on the page is secondary.

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.

Years ago I used to set my alarm for 4 am, so that I could wake up in the middle of a dream and move directly into writing. I guess my favorite poems contain a mixture of intuitive and analytical thought.

Memorizing the work of others definitely made me a better writer.

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.