I came to poetry because I felt I couldn't live properly in the real world.

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.

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.

At the heart of my life is the idea that I don't ever want anything to ever change. That's the basic tenet.

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.