Something I have "authority" on is animal rights. If I were not already so deep into the path I've taken, deep in the woods, I would probably work with animal rights activism because that's really where my heart lies. I think our relationships with animals are sacred and horrific. I've been a vegetarian since I was sixteen. What God said we are allowed to eat anything that does not have thumbs?

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.

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

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 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.

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.

Confession may well be a dirty word in poetry.