Although I know it's unfair I reveal myself one mask at a time.

I don’t think I’d complain if I were overrated.

Your poem effectively begins at the first moment you’ve surprised or startled yourself. Throw away everything that preceded that moment, and begin with that moment.

When I stop becoming, that’s when I worry.

Finally, what I want from poetry is akin to what Flaubert wanted from novels. He thought they should make us dream. I want a poem, through its precisions and accuracies, to make me remember what I know, or what I might have known if I hadn’t been constrained by convention or habit.

All I wanted was a job like a book so good I’d be finishing it for the rest of my life.

Too many poets are insufficiently interested in story. Their poems could be improved if they gave in more to the strictures of fiction: the establishment of a clear dramatic situation, and a greater awareness that first-person narrators are also characters and must be treated as such by their authors. The true lyric poet, of course, is exempt from this. But many poets wrongly think they are lyric poets.

When people praise a poem that I can’t understand I always think they’re lying.

Isn’t there a curious elegance in how one moment passes into another?

Originality, of course, is what occurs when something new arises out of what’s already been done.