We humans have an amazing way of making everything personal.

If I begin a poem, "I am a donkey," reason kicks in and says, "She is taking on the persona of a donkey." But if I write, "I have taken so many drugs I can't see my feet," the tendency is to take that as a confession on the part of the poet. Maybe that doesn't matter. I'd almost prefer for it to be the other way round.

A lot of people are writing poems and don't realize it. They have this limited idea of how the poem should sound or what subjects it should address.

We humans have an amazing way of making everything personal.

I do have a tendency to invest inanimate objects with human qualities.

Writing a poem is always a process of subtracting: you start with all of language available to you, and you choose a smaller field.

Whether you're talking about political borders or aesthetic divisions (and clearly, the political ones have much more tragic consequences), it seems like once they are created, we want to patrol them, enforce them.