There's a certain pleasure in violating the strictures of your education. The trick is, if you're going to explore ideas in a poem, to be suspicious of ideas and suspicious of your own mind at the same time. It's often a matter of orchestration and pacing. Of shaping some kind of dialectic flow.

If the motive of writing is for some people a kind of exercise in dirty laundry, that's one thing. I've always thought of my poems as meant to be overheard, as I think all of these poems are. It seems to me if you get experience right, even your most painful or humiliating experiences - if you get those experiences right for yourself and make discoveries as you go along and find for them some formal glue - they will be poems for others.

I don't let a poem go into the world unless I feel that I've transformed the experience in some way. Even poems I've written in the past that appear very personal often are fictions of the personal, which nevertheless reveal concerns of mine. I've always thought of my first-person speaker as an amalgam of selves, maybe of other people's experiences as well.

I make myself up from everything I am, or could be. For many years I was more desire than fact. When I stop becoming, that’s when I worry.

I will try to disappoint you better than anyone ever has.

Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body.

A true inner world is often revealed by style and sensibility as much as by what appears to be confession.