I mean, what's thematic? How to put it? Going back to, like, 1980, when I started writing poetry. Language itself became an issue. I'd even think about font as an aspect of text, you know, how something looks on a page. A lot of this is the product of a very solitary existence, it's like, language, I mean, you know. A lot of time spent alone in the creation of all of this stuff.

I didn't mind writing incoherently, up until about 1980, occasionally. But after that, I decided, might as well be articulate. And I found, though, that writing poetry affected my prose to the point where I never again wrote in one draft, and my prose just took longer and longer and longer. It took longer and longer to come up with an acceptable text. And that's probably one of the reasons that my output has slowed down.

If I looked at some of these pieces as if this project was not spoken-word but just short anthology, I probably would have fussed with some of the sentences, you know? Syllabication and prosody and such crap. Because the printed word is etched in stone. But for reading purposes I accepted this book of texts in the manner in which I wrote them, no need to fuss. Most of the shorter stuff was written as poetry. Meaning lots of white space on the page.

The first five years as a writer, I didn't know how to write at all. I couldn't write my way out of a white paper bag. And yet, I did some remarkable things. And later on, there were periods where I got this mission to find an articulate voice with rewrites and all. There were periods where I was as dense as Faulkner.

A lot of things appearing under my byline were written in one draft. But when I started to write poetry, I started getting fussy about every syllable. I wouldn't allow the work to be seen unless it felt perfect. Not clunky at all, no clunky syllables. So, really, for the printed page, it had to have a feeling of rhythmic and syntactic verisimilitude or something.

If I'm very drunk, I can improvise. But generally speaking, no. Generally speaking, almost all of my work is material that was first done on the printed page. And the shorter ones that you might call poems, I had a stretch from '79, '80, for five or six years, where I wrote a lot of poetry as such. Simply because I was asked to.

No matter what, I'm never going to get an anthology from an actual publisher, though I could always score another music anthology. But if this is going to be a document of a multiplicity of my writings, it'll do. It feels like a birthday party or something.