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.

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.

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.

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've been working on a collection of prose vignettes about girls I've had crushes on, from the age of six to the age of eighteen. This manuscript is thematic and organized in a way my poems about my friends aren't. My friends get into the poems simply because they mean a lot to me.

So writing about love or having it infuse the poems that I'm writing has never been something I've set myself to do, except when I write a poem for my wife, for an occasion, such as our anniversary.

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.