Erasures are interesting to me because they prove what particular sieves we all are.

I don't like basements, but definitely basements could be poems. Not fond of skin diseases, but again, there's a pattern. Probably anything could be a poem.

I have poetic failures all the time. Many failed poems. I try not to publish those, though some have slipped into each book, since I can't always tell they're failures until later... or I don't want to admit that they are.

People "confess" can be wildly different. I might go into the confessional and say, "Father, what is my obsession with miniatures?"

I don't think that you can say by any stretch of the imagination that all Wisconsin or Brooklyn-based poets write in a particular way. Similar sensibilities can spring up next to each other in the flower bed, or across oceans.

Poetic success is when you write a poem that makes you excited and bewildered and aglow.

Encountering rhyme out of the blue is like finding a long-lost twin (fraternal), or a suitcase that closes with a particularly satisfying click.