I love what's left after love has been tested.

Better to be furious at one thing, become radiant with purpose. Better to love links and rhythms than all-embracing answers.

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.

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

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

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.

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