Magical, crazy, sexy, and brilliant associations of thought that are true. They have to be true, or no one cares.

I can't describe my poetry, and I don't think any poet should try to describe his or her work unless he or she is under duress or torture. Self-consciousness is the death of spontaneity.

Stuart Dybek has said that prose can do anything that poetry can do except for the mind-messes created by line-breaks. But obviously poetry relies on association and compression in a way that prose fiction doesn't always. If you compress everything and concentrate it in fiction, the fiction becomes exhausting to read, and sterile.

It's harder for me to read poets who are much younger than I am because I don't always know what they're talking about, or I don't feel that way anymore about my experiences, the way I once did. But I try to read a book of poems every two weeks or so. I won't name names. I try to read everybody, but of course I fail.

I try to figure out what's wrong with it. I get drunk. I read it aloud. I make it sexier or crazier. Frozen = timid or cowardly or scared.

This is an invitation to an over-generalization. My temptation is to say that American poetry is getting too abstract and self-centered. I don't see enough of the world outside of language in contemporary American poetry. You could get a lot of contemporary American poetry by flipping the dial on late-night radio. Modern history, our history, needs its poetry, just as contemporary life needs legible poetry, and the wild associations that can see metaphorically what's going on at the Mall of America and the candidacy of Rick Santorum. But I would never, ever, tell poets what they should write about.