i'm alternatingly brilliant and witless-and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in.

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.

I think there is something about coming to a city to work that puts you in touch with it in a different way.

Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.

I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years.

Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.

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.