I wanted to pack a lot into the lyric, but not go beyond its bounds. Some have written that I wanted to expand what the lyric could do. I just want the hugeness of experience-which includes philosophical discursiveness-to move at a rate of speed that kept it (because all within one unity of experience) emotional. Also, often, questions became the way the poems propelled themselves forward It brings the reader in as a listener to a confession[.] A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.

If there is anything I love most, in the poems I love, it is the audible braiding of that bravery, that essential empty-handedness, and that willingness to be taken by surprise, all in one voice.

The way things work / is that eventually / something catches.

Water is a miracle - it takes so many forms - is the core of life - is holy. So it becomes important to pay utmost attention to the holiness which is this planet's life - blood, which we are destroying. I always look for it in a poem. I honor it. I pay it mind.

What poetry can, must, and will always do for us: it complicates us, it doesn’t ‘soothe.’

Brilliant, hard-earned and honest. The erasures and reappearances of figure and ground-that hard drama-have rarely been so movingly undertaken. A heartbreakingly beautiful work.

The primary function of the creative use of language - in our age - is to try to constantly restore words to their meanings, to keep the living tissue of responsibility alive.