Q. In your second book of poetry, Sunflower Brother, you have a knack for turning a familiar image into something unfamiliar that becomes, in the course of the poem, recognizable again, like in "New River Blues," where "snuffed fuses of milkweed" become "cotton wadding." You juxtapose the natural with the man-made, pit them against one another to create an almost violent harmony. How do you perceive the relationship between the natural world and violence? And what role does it play, consciously, in your poems?

A. That, in a nutshell, is the point of poetry and art, to make what we think we know to be exhausted and mundane, once again unfamiliar and strange, to prompt a new perspective or way of seeing the world, to get reality to become unrecognizable again. We approach work that is truly new the way we approach a place we don’t know: we look for familiar patterns, for example, or try to sense what is already known in that place. It’s one of the reasons that truly new work—and I am not making such a claim about my own poems, necessarily—is so easy to dismiss. You know it and I know it: the least daring work at any given moment is more likely to be rewarded with attention and sometimes critical acclaim. It stakes a claim on the reader’s attention in a way that is safe and not challenging, and not all the essays about accessibility nor poems about making love to Emily Dickinson are going to change that fact. I want to speak very carefully, because I don’t want to turn this into a political argument about formalism vs. the so-called experimental, about accessibility vs. difficulty; it’s something more fundamental. Art is always a bold experiment and it always has connective tissue to the forms that helped give birth to it, and yet it must sever those ties. Whoever heard of a newborn surviving without the cord being cut?

Q. In "Petersburg Dawn" you speak of "Silence. A spark…" Your poetry is a paradox of silence and sound…quiet as "night air," but pierced by a "warbling call." What roles do silence and ruckus play in creating your poetry? What is the relationship and is it one and the same for you?

A. You are definitely on to something there. Silence and ruckus, as you call it, are crucial doubles of one another, and it is poetry’s distinct purview to combine the two into music. Think about it for a second. A poem can be read out loud, but it emerges out of and returns to, in the end, silence. What about when you are reading a poem to yourself? Is there noise in your head, or is it silence the words belong to? I guess it is my own version of John Cage’s equation between music and silence, in which silence itself could be seen as a kind of catalyst or spark, that it is a kind of flammable fuel, combustible, so to speak, at least within the idiom of this particular poem, which of course takes place on an American battlefield. The silence also connects the reader of the poem, I hope, with the young man who is exploded in Petersburg, over a hundred years ago: the speaker is connected to him by the most simple of perceptions, the awareness of breathing, the sounds that crickets make, the calm rustlings of summer’s night, and yet the distances across which it connects are profound. I suppose one could think of that connection as a kind of warbling call sent out not just between writer and reader in this sense, but between the living and the dead. And I don’t mean to sound highfalutin: the next time you read Keats, think about the fact that you are communicating with the dead; the next time you write a poem, consider with incredible humility the awesome fact that you might possibly be sending out a message across the ages to some future reader.

Q. In this book, death is weighted as the "swollen cheeks" of the girl in "Turn of the Century," or the "bloated cluster of ticks" in "Recipe for the Fire." Death seems to be a rupture…but is that rupture finite or infinite as "the pigeon [continuing] its long climb forever in a speck of gray?" In other words, is it, and your poetry, a closing or an opening?

A. Well I hope that my work is an opening, but the irony is that one has to close off a poem, to tie off the umbilical cord, to run with an earlier metaphor, before one can open. In terms of death, I wouldn’t propose to say. I am attached to the idea that maybe one opens somehow when one dies, but I also find it crucial to consider this world to be absolutely a finite stage which ends decisively: both thoughts inform my rather strict moral sense of what is possible in the world, and I don’t know that the two are entirely at odds with one another. If thought is so complex, why can’t the universe be complex as well? And if irony is the personality of history, as we know it to be, then shouldn’t a poem, shouldn’t a life, both open and close?

Q. Name a writer whose work is currently making you jealous.

A. The Russians distinguish between two kinds of envy, which they predictably call white envy and black envy; white envy refers to a kind of admiration, a desire to inhabit that person’s way of seeing the world, but in a way that preserves distinctions of the self. The following list represents just a few of my peers and also writers who are no longer with us whom I envy with white envy, and the books I have been especially moved by of late:

Wind in a Box, Terance Hayes

The Branch Will Not Break, James Wright

Jesus’s Son, Denis Johnson

Black Box, Erin Belieu

Also, the work of the following writers: Reginald Shepherd, Anthony McCann, Tessa Rumsey, DA Powell, David Blair, Jorie Graham, Charles Wright, George Garrett, Kate Jackson, Mary Szybist, Tanya Larkin, Noelle Kocot, CD Wright, Chekhov, Graham Greene, Donald Revell, and the list goes on. . .

Q. What kind of child were you?

A. I’d say that the single most consistent facet of my childhood was a sense of injustice, which manifested itself anywhere from whining about a helping of ice-cream or a being given the smeared Reese’s cup, to the kind of compassion for those around me that forged a sometimes unnatural obligation of loyalty and an expectation that such loyalty would be reciprocated. My most profound moments of disappointment as a child happened either when I felt that I’d been let down in some way, left out of something, excluded from some adventure, or even worse, when I let somebody down or didn’t do something I ought. Another thing that strikes me was that I was constantly into things: always in trouble, lighting things on fire, or stealing antique silver dollars to fix a guitar up which I couldn’t play, getting caught breathing in the gas from a lighter and trying to breathe fire, for which crime I was duly caught and punished. I was always interested in the various forms of transgression, especially those that seemed just to me, and as a result, I was constantly drawn inward into fantasies about how some moment should have gone, or later, of how the world should be. Lastly, I was often only half there as a child, in some kind of comic book fantasy world or obsessed with, for example, the English television show Doctor Who, an obsession I took as far as putting on my father’s silk dressing gown and taking his cane for a walk around the neighborhood in one of his father’s snap brim fedora hats; this led to the strange and absurd delusion that I was in some way special, like I’d been gifted with some kind of special status as a superhuman. This was absurd of course, but it fed me whole-cloth into the world of reading, fiction, literature, and ultimately poetry; and the images from my reading fed my rich inner world.

Q. What's your relationship with rejection like?

A. I do not deal with rejection well. Every rejection slip is a unique and personal affront to me; the editors of those magazines are not just turning down my work, but rejecting every facet of my being; the work is unimaginably bad in my mind at these moments, and I have never been able to shake it off. The same is true for job offers that go sour: the more experience I have with rejection, and the greater my list of accomplishments, the less equipped I am to deal with it. I won’t even mention personal rejections here, like the one I am going through now. Those seem particularly deliberate and cruel, though I know enough now not to blame anybody for them, not the flippest editor nor the ficklest girlfriend. When somebody turns me down in any way it is as if I am the only one in the world who has ever been rejected; I am completely alone in my dejection. You’d think it wouldn’t be this way, I suppose, but it is. I can’t really explain it. Sometimes I wish I’d just grow an extra layer of skin or two; sometimes it feels like I am one big surface wound. Other times I am really quite tough, but never about somebody dismissing my work.

Q. What book do you feel you suffered for the most? How?

A. I suffer for every single piece of writing I do. How is it possible to quantify such things? I even struggle over reading, which is a uniquely personal process for me. I suppose that the poems towards the end of my first book, Everlasting Quail, were particularly hard, especially the poems about Laura Van Wyhe being murdered. So the poems about the suffering of people who are not me strike me as far more difficult to write than the ones about my own, if only because I am highly sensitive to the charge that I might be benefiting from that suffering, keeping it alive somehow. The manuscript I am currently completing was also unbelievably difficult for me to write, especially the poems about the war and the filmmaker Garrett Scott dying. In the ecstasy of my grief, running on three days without sleep, at the wake after his funeral, I read an unfinished poem I was working on about Garrett—I had no business reading something like that, certainly not under those circumstances, and yet people were really quite moved by it. You asked about rejection earlier: why is it that I remember the one person who accused me of using Garrett’s death to promote myself when I read that poem at his wake?

Q. What was the greatest surprise for you in writing these recent pages?

A. I can’t really answer this question without pointing out that every line for me is a surprise. Or else, why bother writing at all? I don’t ever really start with an idea for a poem in mind. I have to build them from the inside out, and I don’t know any other way to write.

Q. Do you have a writerly habit you'd like to break?

A. Yes. I’d like to cut back on the obsessive repetitions each book seems to have in common, especially the list of words each sequence of poems seems to have in common. I would like to write poems that aren’t always so difficult, about subject matter that isn’t always so disturbing. I’d like to write a poem that brings the reader a serious kind of joy; I’d like to attempt to seduce a woman I really care for with a poem I wrote just for her, then burn that poem the next day, whether it worked or not. I’d like to have kids, so I could write poems for them that would delight and transfix, and while we are at it, I’d like to write stories for kids, whether in verse or in book form, with illustrations that my brother had made.

In short, I’d like to stop caring so much about it, without giving up the actual writing. And I’d like to write short stories and maybe a novel. I also think I rely too heavily on the long poem; I’d like to write a series of lyrics that grab the reader in one short little lyric burst. Do they always have to be these long drawn out depressing affairs? I’d like to make myself laugh from time to time. Last of all, I’d like to make some money from my writing for once, without compromising the quality and seriousness of the work.