I’m interviewed on the cool site Yrteop.com

I had so much fun doing this interview. I hope you like it too. If you do, please Tweet it or share it on Facebook or on your blog. Many thanks to Chris at Yrteop.com! Here’s a few moments excepted to give you a sense of what we talked about:

I think you make a body real in a poem, and this might sound counter-intuitive, by connecting it to an image or sense that will pull the reader away from the familiar—the body is perhaps the thing most familiar because we inhabit it every second of every day—and into the unimagined. It’s a tall order, and I don’t always do it.

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I should also say the worst thing—the killing-est thing—can be to have even the slightest fear of the body, of revealing it, of wanting it. One of the true formative moments for me as a poet, and also a Rubicon moment, was when my mentor at Emerson brought me into his office to read a poem. There was an image in the poem of a beautiful man, running on the beach, I think, wearing only a pair of tiny hot-pink shorts. (I’ve been trying to find that poem ever since; I wonder now if it even existed or if I’ve created it because I needed it.)