Well, I believe that "thinking" is just as real a phenomenon in the world as anything else, and just as worthy of exploration. Maybe even more? So writing about "thought" to me is like writing about a tree or anything else real.

I just know from experience that reading a funny poem aloud, especially at the beginning of a public reading, can have a certain effect. Somehow narrowing the spectrum of possible emotional reactions. So while I like it when people laugh at my poems, and I definitely enjoy being funny in them, I don't really think that's the most important thing that's going on, at least not to me.

When I saw the sun bears at the Oakland Zoo, I immediately was drawn to them. Not to be ornery, but regarding what you said about the speaker identifying with the bear: I'm not sure it's exactly right to say that the speaker feels that the bear must share his sadness, or whatever else he is feeling. That would be classic pathetic fallacy, which is certainly generative for poetry, but here the speaker appears actually to be rejecting that idea.

What poetry is asking us to accept can be difficult. Our proximity to our mortality, the fragility of our existence, how close we live in every moment to nameless abysses, and the way language itself is beautifully, tragically, thrillingly insufficient...these are some of the engines that drive the poem. It's natural to want to turn away from these things. But we have to face them, as best we can, at least sometimes. Poetry can help us in that nearly impossible work.

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

Today is such a strange day. The news is out about the Russians and mini-Donald. This seems like a turning point, but it certainly has felt that way before. Like all of us, I am vibrating with electric uncertainty. How do you manage to concentrate and write poems? I know that for me it is just a relief to be in that sort of thinking, away from the news and all the immense global and personal worries.

My own experience as a reader and writer has been that the more I read, and the more I live, the more different "types" of poetry I grow to love. I might not even believe anymore that there are "types" of poetry at all. I've come to love things I once would snootily have dismissed. Of course I still have my likes and dislikes, and there are things I think are just plain old bullshit, but more and more I am far more trusting of my loves than my dislikes.