Part of the pleasure of giving a reading comes from the rapport between the audience and the poet. I don't want to get mystical here, but there's an energy flow that begins with the poet, and the energy goes out to the audience, and they're energized, and then they return that energy to the poet. As someone standing up there alone, facing these people, I can feel that rapport (or its absence).

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's fun to have a crush on somebody, even one that lasts only fifteen seconds. In New York I can go down the street and have a crush on somebody coming toward me, and then she walks by and the crush disappears. It's quite pleasant.

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.

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.

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.

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.