Interview

This collection covers two decades and more of your life in poetry. Any thoughts on how you put together the "selected" pieces?



In the end, I guess, I treated Exceptions and Melancholies like any other collection, like any particular poem's assemblage, but as the greater assemblage of an entire collection of poems-in this case, a really big poem.



How do your new poems differ from those in Twice Removed?



I only have two tools with which to work; the language in which I compose and the fact of my experience, which includes, of course, my imagination. If the poems have changed over the years, it is because my life has changed, and so too my orientation to and rapport with the language.



Poetry is the language for which we have no language. If I'm doing my job, if I'm without distraction and in my trance, I'm hearing the language that enacts the fact of my reality so that it might spin a reader or listener into his or her own unique, singular reality.



In one of your poems, you mention: "I write down everything as I forget it / especially at night." Could you talk about the significance of this?



I once read that Turner, when he was working with watercolors, would paint fast and furiously in an effort to capture the light at the moment of composition. I don't keep a diary or journal, though there are scraps of paper everywhere. I'm not prolific. But when I put down a few lines, or many lines, I make them quickly. The poems build that way. And if I let myself finish a poem, no matter how few or many days it may take, I tend to trust it. If I don't, I throw it away. I throw a lot of stuff away. I never rewrite what I let myself finish.