When the music created by the sounds and ordering of the words matches the thrust of the meanings of the words, then a radiant state of awareness can occur.

For me, prose is never a poem. Because with prose there are so very few tools to create the music. And one of the most important tools missing is the ability to create silences, as you can in poetry by how you fashion the lines and breaks within the lines and stanzas.

Poetry is very playful with language. I think all poetry, at its heart, is playful. It's doing unusual and playful things with the language, stirring it up. And prose is not doing that. Primarily it's not attempting to do that.

My object when writing prose is to write as clearly as possible. I think I know what I'm saying in prose, and I want others to understand it and to be able to restate it.

People sometimes think that defining a term is pedantic and useless, but terms need to be defined if they're going to be discussed, even if the terms are only defined for a single conversation. Those involved in the conversation need to know how the terms are being used.

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.

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.