"Usually a poem takes shape accoustically - a line or a pair of lines will repeat itself in my ear."

"If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done."

"But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history."

"I'm more interested in the meaning of funerals and the mourning that people do. It's not a retail experience. It's an existential one."

"So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations."

"Well the themes for me were and remain sex and love and grief and death - the things that make us and undo us, create and destroy, how we breed and disappear and the emotional context that surrounds these events."

"I'm lazy but generally task oriented so having a hoop to jump through means eventually I'll make the effort."

"Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough."