Cargo cults fascinate me partly because Christianity itself is in many ways a cargo cult.

In fact, lots of good poetry doesn't work , so I don't mind a bit of mystification or difficulty.

I think all writing is about writing. All writing is a way of going out and exploring the world, of examining the way we live, and therefore any words you put down on the page about life will, at some level, also be words about words. It's still amazing, though, how many poems can be read as being analogous to the act of writing a poem. "Go to hell, go into detail, go for the throat" is certainly about writing, but it's also hopefully about a way of living.

When you're rereading or editing your book and you start to expect that this work is going to be reviewed, and you can sort of tell which line is going to show up in reviews.

That's what Samuel Johnson said: "Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think particularly fine, strike it out."

The reason that the book exists is because there was a gap in you. You wrote the book to fulfill that gap in some way.

You become a writer because you like to be alone in a room with your books.