The speaker tentatively reaches out with that feeling and realizes that it's kind of absurd, or at least a dangerous consolation, which is what I think is discovered as that longish sentence at the end of the poem comes to its conclusion. But here I am interpreting my own poem, which is kind of like making out with one's own high school yearbook photo.

Always in search of the question that might make you ask me one in return

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

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.

It's just interesting to me that the physical enactment of that mind moving has gradually changed for you in the last few years. It made me wonder if the change was deliberate in any sense, or procedural, like when A.R. Ammons stuck an adding machine roll into his typewriter to squeeze his verses into shorter lines.

I would like to try to write poetry that would do everything I wanted poems to do, but also be readable by any person. I didn't know if this was possible, but I suddenly knew, in that few-times-in-a-lifetime sort of way, that this would be my life's search.

I don't think poetry needs to be "easily understandable." First of all, there are often complexities of syntax, form, unfamiliar absences, etc., that require a deeper concentration than is usually demanded of us. So that, right off the bat, is a little difficult. Then there is the deeper issue of what poetry is really asking of us. I feel it is asking us to read with great, even sacred, care and attention. That, too, is difficult. It requires discipline and the creation of a temporary zone of privacy, which is inimical to our current conditions of life.