I actually can't listen to music and write poetry at the same time, but I do kind of think about the music I've been listening to when I write.

I learned to write with my desk in the living room, next to the TV. But mostly in my head, and I try to be able to do it under any circumstances.

I actually can't listen to music and write poetry at the same time, but I do kind of think about the music I've been listening to when I write.

Confessionalism relates to writers of color. I think confessional poetry is in its way very Catholic, capital C. One of the formative ideas of Confessionalism, beyond psychoanalysis, is a very actual fall from grace. And, at least in America, people of color never occupy that position of grace the way that white people do. So I think that in some very actual ways the confessional mode, strictly speaking, is not possible for non-white writers.

I had/have a habit of sending books out before they're ready. And then I edit with almost absurd intensity. But I've done about a book a year.

There's no such thing as an animal too big too kill, AND we're cornered by such animals every day.

I definitely notice the absence of character in most poetry, which is not so say that I'm an innovator in that regard. Character-based poems are not weird or new by any stretch but they feel strange and new because the atmosphere is one in which no one does that. People always talk about, and with good reason, poetry's unpopularity. When people say that they forget or they brush aside the fact that in the middle part of the last century poetry was immensely popular. Dylan Thomas was basically a rock star; so was Anne Sexton.