Saul Bellow has that character in Henderson the Rain King say: "I want, I want, I want!"9 I remember reading this passage years ago and thinking, yes, that's the human.

The poem is not a physical body. It's a textual body that has life only insofar as it can act symbolically. It cannot physically act.

I do want to do the entire alphabet. There's in [Walker's Alphabet] a poem called "A Life" in that grouping. I was going to change that title to "A."

My brothers were my peers, but they were not the preeminent male figures in my emotional life.

Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.

I was walking every morning, and I'd take my iPod and paper and pen. As I walked, I wrote a poem, and then I'd come home - and sometimes it's legible, sometimes not - I typed the poem up. So I have a new, yet to be published, collection of poems now. It's called Walker's Alphabet, and among other things, it is about walking. My most recent collection of poems in 2010, incidentally, was titled WALKING backwards.

Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks.