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.

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.

Confession may well be a dirty word in poetry.

Every thing is changing every minute.

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.

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.

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.