Poetry challenges you. Much of its importance is that it's one of the few places left in culture that makes things difficult-it asks you to think, to perceive and not to take for granted what we think about the world.
Words are substance strange. Speak one and the air ripples into another's ears. Write one and the eye laps it up. But the sense transmutes, and the spoken word winds through the ear's labyrinth into a sense that is no longer the nerve's realm. The written word unfolds behind the eye into the world, world's image, and the imagination sees as the eye cannot see-thoughtfully.
The poems are part of my attempt to understand being in the world in an honest way.
[The publication of his first poem] was wonderful ... but it taught me early on that the only thing that really matters is writing the next poem. Publication is best seen as a happy accident.
