Almost everything that's happened in my poetry is what you might call organic. I don't do much preconceiving. The only consistent plan I've ever had is to try to break my patterns, my habits, my kneejerk tendencies in writing. If I start to sound too much like the Ron Padgett that I've read before, I stop myself. I don't want to get locked perpetually in a mode or a level of diction or a stylistic vein - what is called a poetic voice.

It seems more than likely that the translating of poetry is going to rub off on the translator if he or she is a poet.

Not everyone is at the top of his or her game all the time - you can't be.

Maybe lurking in my unconscious was the idea that when someone's collected poems are published it means that the poet is dead. I found myself looking at my work as if I were at my own funeral.

Working with artists and other poets has made me aware that there was a bigger "me" that I hadn't been quite aware of. Plus we had a good time. It's so much fun to write, for example, with a big brush on a giant piece of paper and to help create visually attractive and surprising objects, which is not what you normally do when you're writing a poem. It's wonderful to create these pieces with artists.

Collaborating with someone who doesn't understand your language nor you theirs stretches you open even wider, into a sort of very large free fall.

I don't do much of anything consciously in writing - in poetry writing, anyway, prose usually being a different matter, of course.