Bring to me, it said, continual proof / you've been alive.

Isn't there a curious elegance in how one moment passes into another?

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.

Although I know it's unfair, I reveal myself one mask at a time.

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.

There are always the simple events of your life that you might try to convert into legend.

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