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

I have thought for many years that the audience any creative writer imagines has a great effect on what gets written.

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

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.

I see my poems as interlinked. No poem gives an answer. It may offer other questions, it may instigate other questions that then become poems.

I think parts of my soul have been saved by my writing, not in the sense of escaping death, but escaping the death of the moment, perhaps.

I like poetry because poetry - even in free verse - is formal, and it has to be very concise and packed and rich, and I like the feeling of having to do that, having to make the language tight and still free, as if the deepest freedom is created by the restrictions.