Writing directly from a feeling of anger or sadness is difficult, but if you distract part of your brain with word games, the ignored emotion often tiptoes in.
I’m interested in concrete poems – anything that complicates the line between the written and the visual.
As a reader I don’t distinguish between confessional and non-confessional work. After all, how do we even know that certain “I” poems are confessional? It’s a tricky business, this correlating of the speaker and the poet.
I also like poems that are haunted by a structure or a narrative, or poems that frisk flirtatiously at the boundary of sense.
What I like about prose poems is that they seem to make people uncomfortable – people want to define them, justify them, attack them. Prose poems are natural fence-sitters.
I suppose it’s useful in designating writing that tends to come from personal experience, work that delineates an “I,” but it’s a loose lasso, one which may rope certain poems by one poet and not others.
In my own writing, I’ve mostly abandoned end-rhyme, but wordplay is still a huge part of my process.
I read a lot of graphic novels – some of my favorites graphic novelists or artists are Rebecca Kraatz, Gabrielle Bell, Graham Roumieu, Tom Gauld, and Renee French.
I do have a tendency to invest inanimate objects with human qualities.
When I start writing a poem, I can usually know quite early on whether it’s a lineated or prose poem, but I don’t think I can explain how. It’s like deciding whether to wear a skirt or a pair of pants.
I like to photograph miniature constructed scenes – I’ll buy a very sad cake decoration like a plastic computer for a dreary office birthday party and construct a wildly colorful scene to put on its screen, or do a series of dollhouse chairs frozen in ice cubes.
Erasures are interesting to me because they prove what particular sieves we all are.
To be a poet you have to experiment.
Teaching is a great way to keep learning.
Not everyone is going to like every carnival ride.
People “confess” can be wildly different. I might go into the confessional and say, “Father, what is my obsession with miniatures?”
I’m all over my poems, even if their relation to my everyday life is that of dream to reality.
I grew up spending time at my grandmother’s farm in Germany and she lived a few kilometers away from the border between east and west Germany. It was so strange that roads which used to connect two towns now ended in the middle.
If you were going to make sculptures of them, the swivel poems would be disparate objects all attached with hinges and the prose poems would be small sheep wrapped in extra wool.
I certainly believe you can write a narrative lyric or a lyrical narrative – why not a nyric or a larrative?