I am fascinated with criminal law because it is as rigorous as a poem and because it is based on what has been written down even before one has committed a crime.

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

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

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.

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.

I am fascinated with criminal law because it is as rigorous as a poem and because it is based on what has been written down even before one has committed a crime.