The British public has always had an unerring taste for ungifted amateurs.
I think the grotesque can inspire intimacy (it draws us in) as well as awe, like the cabinets of curiosities.
I prefer assonance and internal rhyme to end rhyme. I mean, the sonnet already looks like a box. Best not to get too boxed in, though.
I'm very interested in the materiality of language. I wonder if, perhaps, this comes from my background in the visual arts. I was a potter for a number of years and earned a BFA in art before going to graduate school for creative writing.
I like to work with multiple sections because they lend themselves to the structure of the poem: its intensifications and arcs and closures. I feel like working with smaller units feels more natural to the way I write poems.
I tend to gravitate toward the realm of superstition (cures and such) and odd scientific facts (like bioluminescent shrimp and fistulated cows). I like the intimacy that I often find in the grotesque.
My obsessions tend to cluster, so I often have families of poems in which only a couple of them make it to the book. It can be satisfying to banish poems to my "crappy poems" file.
Humanity is a river of light running from the ex-eternity to eternity.
You can't eat fish. It's 6,000 parts DDT per million all over the world, not counting radiation.
It is a curious fact that with Through the Looking-Glass the faculty of making book illustrations departed from me. . . . I have done nothing in that direction since.
There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.