No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?
Who is the ideal reader? God only knows.
I have become intrigued with the combining of seemingly unrelated ideas or images, or the drawing upon the many, sometimes dissimilar, meanings a word might have.
I sometimes like to tinker with poems that have failed, ones that I have sent aside. Even years afterward, I will revisit them if there is something about them that I cannot give up on.
Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.
Poets can't resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse.
An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.
I have been told by a member of the board of one of Canada's most prominent literary magazines that a submission of mine once caused a great deal of controversy.
To me many short poems read and write like beginnings that simply whet my appetite; I want to get over that.
Reading should be a repeat performance.
Writing can sometimes be exploitative. I like to take a few steps of remove in order to respect the privacy of the subject. If readers make the link, they have engaged with the poem.
Most victims of my autobiographical verse are either far too polite, remarkably understanding unaware that I have written poems about them.
I find it exhausting to administer a magazine without an office or paid staff.
I have always been very obsessed with time. Time's passage makes us all very vulnerable and because we all experience it in our own way, it can make us feel very alone.
I became intrigued with colour theory. The absurd pronouncements of the Colour Institute, a group that decides what colours are hot each year or season, amused me.
The point of an experiment is not to arrive at a predetermined end point, to prove or disprove anything, but to deliver a poem that reveals much about the process taken.
The community of poets I belong to is not as close as it used to be, if only for the fact that our lives have become busier: jobs, children, and the like.
The poet must decide not to impose his feelings in order to write without sentimentality.
I consider a poem to be a kind of experiment where a number of elements are brought together under test conditions to see how they will interact to create meaning or relevance.
Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.