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

I don't think there's any law where you have to read a poem and immediately understand it.

With an age difference comes a great gap in cultural references, and so on. It's not all about race and gender. It interests me that, as you get older, your younger self becomes a stranger to you. A split occurs within yourself. But maybe we're all always strangers to ourselves.

Writing a poem is a more personal experience, I think, than writing prose. And perhaps reading a poem is a more personal experience than reading prose, though that's harder to say.

Publishing a book is a great thing, and I'm grateful, but it's also a horrible, exposing thing. Once you've published a book, you never write quite as freely again. You're aware, from that point onward, of the kinds of things critics might say about it. You're aware of the kinds of things your publishers might like and dislike about it. You're half-aware of marketing strategies - of all the stuff around the book. Whereas with your very first piece of fiction, if you're lucky, those things barely occur to you at all.

I think all writing is an attempt to complicate and subvert the dominant narrative. Writing personalizes statistics. It puts a face and a name on a number. I suppose in that sense it's always political.

Most of the poems I write go through forty versions and then stay in a file on my computer. I'm not very good at sending stuff out or feeling that something is ready to send out and I never have been. Part of the problem is that as soon as a poem is finished, it stops being all that interesting to me.