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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.