Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?
Absolutely. As a younger person, I used it primarily as a mode of self-expression, to have something that was about myself. As it is now, I’ve noticed that the public life of Poetry, with its political declarations and its sense if itself as an offshoot of justice, is something I’m not very suited for. I rarely write overtly political poems, or if I do, I keep them to myself. I grew up in a home where it was dangerous to be the youngest child and have an opinion: I was always wrong, or naïve, and so I learned to just be quiet. I’m like that with politics. As for everything else in the realm, it’s all there for me: nature, people, the cosmos; and, of course, a whole subgenre of what I call “AM Radio,” which consists, basically, of love poems. I figure that if musicians can do that as much as they want, so can I. Poets have people they love, and there’s a close cross-over to muse-figures, and it’s delicious to surrender to that affection and make declarative poems that try to capture what it’s like to be a person expressing closeness toward another person.
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