The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior.

I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.

Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically.

Poetry dovetails contradictions.

I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing.

You happened to me. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse.

Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.