Poems can't help but be personal. Mine are certainly an accurate blueprint of the things I think about, if not a record of my daily life.

"Confessional poetry" is another one of those labels. It goes in and out of fashion.

If you were going to make sculptures of them, the swivel poems would be disparate objects all attached with hinges and the prose poems would be small sheep wrapped in extra wool.

I'm all over my poems, even if their relation to my everyday life is that of dream to reality.

In my own writing, I've mostly abandoned end-rhyme, but wordplay is still a huge part of my process.

There isn't a grand plan at work in the progression of the books with respect to the line. I do want the books to be different from each other, certainly, but I'm more aware of that on the level of theme or structure. I can tell when I'm writing the last of a particular type of poem because the writing is too easy and I start to feel queasy.

I suppose it's useful in designating writing that tends to come from personal experience, work that delineates an "I," but it's a loose lasso, one which may rope certain poems by one poet and not others.