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.

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.

Certainly for me prose has a dilatory capacity, insofar as I don't trust my abilities in prose. I imagine I could have done the same thing in poetry, but sometimes I feel more fluent in poetry than in prose, and as a consequence perhaps I might pass too quickly by a thing that I might, in prose, have struggled merely to articulate. That struggle creates space, and it seems to me a particular kind of space into which memory flows easily. I suspect I think better in poetry, however.

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.

I believe rhythmic sensibility is always a product and extension of language, defined broadly, among other things. But it is an immediate product and extension - no time elapses between the exposure to language and the creation of rhythmic sensibility.

I'm always glad that other people are way smarter about my poems than I am.