I find it odd that, in real life people think I am funny but no one ever suspects that on the page! Personally, I think some of my work is a riot! I crack myself up, but I know that the poems seem so relentlessly dark.

I want a poem which is made of compression, passion, precision, symmetry, & disruption.

I think the reason I've published so few books is that I have a pretty high expectation of self-reinvention between books and I would prefer to have been in this world and published fewer works than I would publishing the books that would reveal the process of the changes.

I find it odd that, in real life people think I am funny but no one ever suspects that on the page! Personally, I think some of my work is a riot! I crack myself up, but I know that the poems seem so relentlessly dark.

That's what interests me in poetry. That withholding, that white space, the pressure, and my long-term faith in violent concision, is still with me.

At the heart of my life is the idea that I don't ever want anything to ever change. That's the basic tenet.

I wanted many of the poems to have long legs. At first I was calling them clothespin poems, before I knew what I was doing. The lines seem pulled on either end, tight and taut against the wind.