I like having a phrase lying around to get poems started. It's like having a key.

A white noise app wouldn't work for me - I would be too distracted by the non-white noise noises I could still hear, even more distracted than i would otherwise be. So I have to just accept the regular noises.

I just can't write and listen to music at the same time.

I do try to incorporate particular rhythmic and generally sonic motifs I discover in music as such, and if one thinks of language in a narrow sense, that, perhaps, suggests a possibility for a rhythmic sensibility that enters poetry from outside of language.

I think I cause a lot of headaches for editors - it's impossible to keep up with the ridiculous amount of changes I make.

If I can quote myself, I explained whatever it is I'm doing once for No Tell Motel, and I still think it's the clearest I've ever been about this: I don't write free verse poems - mostly because I can't. But I am interested in the musical effects achievable with free verse.

I wanted to be a composer for a while, and for a while, and maybe still, I found writing music much easier than writing poetry. So maybe my brain clings to it.

I hope I can write toward my interests. But poets should be afraid of too fluidly responding to what they're interested in.

I was just thinking about how my grandparents, who raised me, would be considered white trash, whatever that means - mostly for being racists, I'd say. And how, as a child, I wanted to be like them, and identified with them culturally.

I had/have a habit of sending books out before they're ready. And then I edit with almost absurd intensity. But I've done about a book a year.

People get anxious about dividing sorts of poetry, say Confessionalism from political poetry. But Confessionalism is very much an expression of racial privilege and of class privilege. I don't think it's always a blind expression of these privileges but it does have its genesis in them, in the politics of them.

I don't know that I find either aspect of Jesus more interesting than the other, although maybe I think about the God one more.

There's no such thing as an animal too big too kill, AND we're cornered by such animals every day.

I think about the body kind of all the time, being as how I'm really uncomfortable in mine.

I do believe in Jesus as wholly God and wholly human, and I believe the human part was human.