The poem is a process, a way for me to discover questions, to ask them clearly or to discover the results of certain suppositions. Suppositions are a form of questioning.

Ordering is very important with essays, even if a reader doesn't read the essays or the poems in order through the book...

Sometimes, as in an athletic event where everything clicks, inexplicable things do happen. Learning and practicing an art or a skill has always been part of the success of the goal.

I've spent much of my life being attuned to watching for an image or a phrase that can trigger what might be a poem - could become a poem.

The silences express so much and are so crucial in music, and prose does not allow for the creation of these silences, these white spaces on the page or the computer screen.

From the beginning I felt that I didn't ever want to leave the impression that the process of writing a poem is totally mysterious. I couldn't explain everything that went on in the creation of a poem, but I could try to explain as much as I knew. I thought readers deserved that. I didn't want to set myself apart as being someone special.

I think my prose - mine and that of others - sometimes slips into a cadence or rhythm that can replicate or come close to the music in a wonderful poem, and then it returns to the sound of prose.