A poem usually begins for me with a word, or a few words that suggest themselves as having some bearing on one another.  I roll the word around on my tongue.  I write it on the page.  I look it up, and then read the definitions of the six words nearby in the dictionary.  I take it running with me, so that it can live in the rhythms of the body for a while.  And I try to figure out what it is about that word that has caught my attention.  Slowly, my awareness of how the word is registering for me leads me to other words, other associations, and my job is to figure out how to connect all the dots.  How to draw a line between, for example, “pornography” and “spathe,” in a way that makes sense of why those two words seem to belong together in my head, illuminates that relationship on paper? 

Ultimately, very little about producing a poem is, for me, about being true to some emotion or experience. My interests and concerns, the obsessions that exercise me, are largely representational:  how does language work?  what are its limits?  its possibilities?  I’m drawn to sources that reflect, either implicitly or explicitly, on these issues.  Thus:  Texts turn me on.  Poems.  Dictionaries.  Translations.  Dead languages.  Music.  And, on the other side of the equation, I’m intrigued by the stuff that flouts the dictionaries, exceeds representation, what Hopkins might have called inscape and Benjamin might have called the aura.  I love the tension between these two poles, and spend a lot of time worrying about it, and worrying it.  So, yes:  a tree in the backyard, but only insofar as the tree challenges any effort to record it accurately and precisely and thoroughly.  I’m really more a language poet than anything else, at the end of the day, though it may be hard for a reader to see that aesthetic for the trees, so to speak.