I am attracted to looking at the different things language can mean even in one sometimes quite ordinary utterance. Writing is partly about listening closely to yourself as you think or compose and being aware of the different tensions and weights among the words, the different directions any one of them could lead. I like to play with the multiplicity and instability of meaning partly out of a sense of adventure, to see where that takes me and partly in a whistling past the graveyard kind of way because, of course, sensing stable meaning fall away can be scary.

Poets tend to form loose groups - the "Romantics" or the "Imagists". And sometimes they write manifestoes in the name of these groups. This can be good. It forces the poet and the audience to think. But it can also be dangerous. It can turn into a branding device so that potential readers believe they know all they need to know once they know you've been associated with a certain group or position. It can freeze things in place. That's where thinking stops.

People probably long for something genuinely personal in a society where the personal is often indistinguishable from the "personalized." Maybe the poetry audience member is searching for his or her own "personal space" and they expect the poet to be a sort of avatar of the private life. But that sort of representation is distasteful to me. Asking a poet to represent the personal life is, paradoxically, to turn the poet into something other than a person.

Thus drivers inching southward will see the phalanx of birds heading west as one spontaneous gesture.

But here I hold your dream in my poem.

We sleep together in the dark but confuse light with love.

I tend to like the way poets form communities. Writing can be lonely after all. Modern life can be lonely. Poets do seem to be more social than fiction writers. This could be because of poetry's roots in the oral tradition - poetry is read aloud and even performed. I'm just speculating, of course. At any rate, because poets form these groups, they learn from one another. That is one of the best things about being a poet.