Poetry is the skin that I have between my body and the world's body.
I want a poem which is made of compression, passion, precision, symmetry, & disruption.
I am fascinated with criminal law because it is as rigorous as a poem and because it is based on what has been written down even before one has committed a crime.
That's what interests me in poetry. That withholding, that white space, the pressure, and my long-term faith in violent concision, is still with me.
Every thing is changing every minute.
I think American is very democratic in allowing different hues of language and parts of speech to commingle. William Logan once wrote that I had something of a fetish for what he called "Haute Couture Vulgarity."
I came to poetry because I felt I couldn't live properly in the real world.
I wanted many of the poems to have long legs. At first I was calling them clothespin poems, before I knew what I was doing. The lines seem pulled on either end, tight and taut against the wind.
Something I have "authority" on is animal rights. If I were not already so deep into the path I've taken, deep in the woods, I would probably work with animal rights activism because that's really where my heart lies. I think our relationships with animals are sacred and horrific. I've been a vegetarian since I was sixteen. What God said we are allowed to eat anything that does not have thumbs?
At the heart of my life is the idea that I don't ever want anything to ever change. That's the basic tenet.
Confession may well be a dirty word in poetry.
I find it odd that, in real life people think I am funny but no one ever suspects that on the page! Personally, I think some of my work is a riot! I crack myself up, but I know that the poems seem so relentlessly dark.
Let me just say that the politics that I have are never the politics of poetics. I am not interested in politics. Politically, I am only very conscious of how we live and what we do right and what we do so awfully wrong.
I think the reason I've published so few books is that I have a pretty high expectation of self-reinvention between books and I would prefer to have been in this world and published fewer works than I would publishing the books that would reveal the process of the changes.
