EXCERPT FROM THE INTERVIEW

My definition of poetry is completely amorphous and open-ended–I don’t even know that I know it when I see it. What generates a poem for me is not necessarily an idea or an observation, or even an image, but a chunk of language, a phrase that tends then to start to accrue other things, to pull other bits of language into it. Like sand in an oyster, which is not to say that what results is pearls. We need to come to art with no expectations whatsoever, and allow the experience to be a complete surprise.