I Will Try To Disappoint You Better

The World Is Always Somewhat Vicious. I Take That As A Given, But At Various Times In Various Circumstances That Fact Will Be No More Than A Shadow Or An Echo Behind Some Poem. Other Times It Will Be More Manifest. I Try To Write Myself Into Articulations Of Half-felt, Half-known Feelings, Without Program. I'm Always Working Toward Getting My World And, Hopefully, The World Outside Of Me Into A Version That Makes Sense Of It. Viciousness Requires The Same Precision As Love Does.

Isn't There A Curious Elegance In How One Moment Passes Into Another?

I Don't Let A Poem Go Into The World Unless I Feel That I've Transformed The Experience In Some Way. Even Poems I've Written In The Past That Appear Very Personal Often Are Fictions Of The Personal, Which Nevertheless Reveal Concerns Of Mine. I've Always Thought Of My First-person Speaker As An Amalgam Of Selves, Maybe Of Other People's Experiences As Well.

There's A Certain Pleasure In Violating The Strictures Of Your Education. The Trick Is, If You're Going To Explore Ideas In A Poem, To Be Suspicious Of Ideas And Suspicious Of Your Own Mind At The Same Time. It's Often A Matter Of Orchestration And Pacing. Of Shaping Some Kind Of Dialectic Flow.

I've Tried To Become Someone Else For A While, Only To Discover That He, Too, Was Me.