What feeling feels like over time. An attempt to screw up what feeling feels like over time. Heartbreak and a high C.... The often welcome melodic lie.... The soul's undersong. The orchestration of randomness, a flirtation with the boundaries of silence and space.... a reminder that the self wants to disappear, be taken away from itself and returned.

I think because my parents died in their early 50s, mid 50s, I always thought I would die young. And that's been both a useful thing and I suspect something that's haunted me a little bit.

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.

The world is always somewhat vicious. I take that as a given, but at various times in various circumstances that fact will be no more than a shadow or an echo behind some poem. Other times it will be more manifest. I try to write myself into articulations of half-felt, half-known feelings, without program. I'm always working toward getting my world and, hopefully, the world outside of me into a version that makes sense of it. Viciousness requires the same precision as love does.

And the words we find are always insufficient, like love, though they are often lovely and all we have.

Originality, of course, is what occurs when something new arises out of what's already been done.

I wrote poetry for seven or eight years, maybe longer, before I could say I was a poet. If people asked, I'd say I wrote poetry; I wouldn't go further. I was in my mid- to late-thirties before I felt that I was a poet, which I think meant that I had begun to embody my poems in some way. I wasn't just a writer of them. Hard to say what, as a poet, my place in the world is. Some place probably between recognition and neglect.