Poetry is the skin that I have between my body and the world's body.

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.

Confession may well be a dirty word in poetry.

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

Let me just say that the politics that I have are never the politics of poetics. I am not interested in politics. Politically, I am only very conscious of how we live and what we do right and what we do so awfully wrong.

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.