Genres have a history and impose a historical character upon the writer. What is interesting in the poem involves a certain kind of dramatization of the self that you don't have to engage in in the essay. In fact, the essay is a more social medium than the poem.

Technology is transforming everything. Who knows what it's doing, we don't really understand it.

I think that when you reveal things that are going to cause pain, you have rhetorical resources in poetry.

I could say that in the essay, as it has developed historically, success is determined by the writer's ability to express, through an individual voice, a collective experience - you are speaking individually but you are representing collectively.

Historically, there are hierarchies of purity. Certain aspects of poetry are very, very pure. The lyric poem can't be anything but the lyric poem.

You don't think of yourself as your external representation, or even your national origin or anything like that. You don't reduce yourself to that. That's kind of unthinkable.

I would say that when I write prose I'm a more socially responsible person. I'm much more a citizen of the world. But the instability of the poetry, the emotional jaggedness, is also me.