My obsessions tend to cluster, so I often have families of poems in which only a couple of them make it to the book. It can be satisfying to banish poems to my crappy poems file.

I tend to employ braided narrative threads in the lyric, so often echoes (of phrases or images) will occur and will hit my ear so I can shape different resonances and shifts in tone.

Many of the poets I most admire have a way of embodying their peculiar obsessions via landscape that can sometimes seem magical.

Many of the poems weave autobiographical elements with fabular or mythic materials.

I like to work with multiple sections because they lend themselves to the structure of the poem: its intensifications and arcs and closures. I feel like working with smaller units feels more natural to the way I write poems.

I'm very interested in the materiality of language. I wonder if, perhaps, this comes from my background in the visual arts. I was a potter for a number of years and earned a BFA in art before going to graduate school for creative writing.

I'm a compulsive enjamber. I'm drawn to half-meanings created by the line, so that's definitely an element of craft that's always on my mind. And I'm a big devotee of the short line, of couplets and tercets, and of irregular stanzas with lots of white space. I've got to give the dense language room to breathe!

I tend to gravitate toward the realm of superstition (cures and such) and odd scientific facts (like bioluminescent shrimp and fistulated cows). I like the intimacy that I often find in the grotesque.

I think the grotesque can inspire intimacy (it draws us in) as well as awe, like the cabinets of curiosities.

I prefer assonance and internal rhyme to end rhyme. I mean, the sonnet already looks like a box. Best not to get too boxed in, though.

I tend to view the superstitions or fragments of myth as triggers for lyric inquiry. I also find I think of this kind of language as ars poetica - if we can find the right combination of words, we can make something improbably or extraordinary happen.