Not that I play guitar anywhere near as well as she sings, but I think I have always had a tendency to play solos the same way, in emotional relation to the structure of the song. I choose simple lines, and only play what seems emotionally relevant, and often express that emotion in time, that is in play or resistance to the set time of the song.

I feel because I am never in my comfort zone I have an advantage.

That is a horrible thing in a way, but it is the one thing poets can bring back to experience, this intense focus on language, which activates words as a portal back into experience. It's a mysterious process that's very hard to articulate, because it's focused entirely on the material of language in a way, but in the interests not just of language itself whatever that would mean - that's the mistake, by the way, that so many so-called "experimental" poets make - but in service to human experience.

I wanted to write not exclusively for (or against) poets or scholars, though many of them are people, too! But that was not my primary audience. It was that person you like who tells you they don't get poetry, and you think to yourself, aw man, what can I do for this good person?

All my closest friends came to me through poetry. My wife, too! Other than my family, poetry is the gravitational force of my life.

That choice to be ready to reject all other purposes, in favor of the possibilities of language freed from utility, is when the writer becomes a poet.

I guess my poems feel to me a bit like they are doing something in relation to experience, i.e. time.