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.

The ghosts swarm. They speak as one person. Each has left something undone.

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.

Poetry wants to make things mean more than they mean, says someone, as if we knew how much things meant, and in what unit of measure.

Metaphor is ritual sacrifice. It kills the look-alike. No, metaphor is homeopathy.

We are all full of discourses that we only half understand and half mean.

The fear that all this will end. The fear that it won't.