Although I do find that particular poems work better in metered form and others in free form, I don’t find that it has to do with subject matter. Subject matter is like water: it takes the shape of the container into which you pour it. So I don’t buy the argument that metered poetry can’t express the modern condition. Auden and Larkin remain two of the best poets of 20th Century consciousness and both are formalists. The mistake is thinking that currency in subject matter is a structural problem; it isn’t. It is actually a problem of attention and effort, of concentration and patience. A formalist and a free verse poet may both be original and current, but both will have to work very hard to be that way. There is no way around the work.

Actually the poem determines the form and I discover it. So it’s always different. Although I sometimes sit down with the intention of writing a certain form, this is only an exercise. But just like études, sometimes those exercises yield something of more lasting value. Other times, I wrestle with a poem, even complete it, only to find it works better some other way. I’ve had formal poems turn into free verse poems and free verse poems, with nothing but a tweak, turn into perfectly metered blank verse poems.

I came to poetry somewhat circuitously. Martial arts, Oriental philosophy and my high school library teacher all played a part. At eleven, I started studying martial arts obsessively. Noticing the connection between mental states and physical responses, I started studying philosophy, particularly Lao-Tzu and those Westerners who were bringing such philosophy to the West, like Alan Watts. There is a lot of poetry in those books. The Tao Te Ching is a series of poems.

When I was about fifteen, I injured my back. During that time, my high school library teacher gave an optional assignment of writing a poem. I wrote one and she suggested that I take up writing. During the time my back was healing, I wrote many poems—bad poems--but doing it filled me with a love for poetry. By the time my back healed, I decided poetry could express more fully everything I was trying to say and that it had a closer connection to those mental states that affected physical behavior. This sealed my desire to be a poet.

As for milestones, it’s hard to say where there were particular leaps of insight. Poetic growth, like physical growth, is gradual and nearly imperceptible.

It was a great struggle to come up with a title that was so obvious. In fact, I really should give credit to a friend in Newburyport, Massachusetts for suggesting the title. I read there about a year before the book came out. I read the title poem, "Transcriptions of Daylight," at that reading. Alfred, the friend, was there and said that that poem would make a great title poem for a collection since it seemed to encompass the qualities and subjects of my work so well. I struggled over many other titles, asking friends for their opinions, but finally settled back on this one. Alfred was right: it encompasses my work very well. It also has an ambiguity that is apt for a poet, since poets are always engaged in transcription on multiple levels.

I think every poet does. But I don’t think the poet is usually aware of what that mission is and I don’t think he really needs to be aware of it. However, if I were to articulate such a mission or project in a phrase, it would be to "give water a shape."

This is always a difficult question to answer because there are so many poets I admire and for vastly different reasons. But, of course, one finally settles on those few poets who have some special affinity with one’s own sensibility.

The two poets I’ve spent the most time rereading and considering are John Milton and Richard Wilbur. Other poets I return to over and over are Philip Larkin, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, Donald Justice and Louise Bogan. Most of these poets I love for their music. It is the music of wind and water.

I would say we act in our time and culture, not on them. These things are like gloves; we wear them while, at the same time, we stitch, mend and change them. We are both acting in them and on them simultaneously. And our acting in them is an implicit comment on them. But this is inevitable since one can’t be a poet and be inert in culture. Every poem is a comment on the culture, language and times from which it comes. And all of them have the potential to influence those times. But I am only one person in a culture of billions. My ability to influence the times, as a poet or otherwise, will be limited by such a fact.

I see it as both. But the question itself is interesting because it suggests an absolute opposition between readers and listeners by implying that readers always read silently. I read poetry out loud—and even some prose. I am both a reader and listener. This is how I imagine my audience: reading alone in their rooms, but reading out loud. So they are listeners—but not necessarily of me. They are listeners of the poem. I expect the text on the page to be written well enough so a reader can translate the text into the act of recital. This is vital for poems since they’re meant to be recited. And reciting is different from both reading and singing.

Something worthy of their attention, since once they give it they can’t get it back. But in general, I hope each poem is an aesthetic space in which they can contemplate.

Their complete and patient attention.

Emily Dickinson said something like, "If I feel as if the top of my head were physically removed from my body, I know that that is a poem." This criterion has always suited me.

I don’t know that the business world is actually "suited" to poetry but I think it’s helpful for a poet to do something that has nothing to do with writing. Aesthetically, as biologically, inbreeding is the death of a species.

I assume we’re talking about professional criticism. Its first job is to separate the wheat from the chaff. Its second job is to help a reader enter those poems worthy of exploration. But I think both of these tasks are difficult when it comes to truly innovative poetry. Innovative poetry initially eludes the detection of critics because criticism always proceeds with terms derived from the existing canon of poetry. We have to learn how to read poets and poems and that takes a long time. Poetry that is radically different, even slightly different, demands things we are not accustomed to. Like all things we aren’t accustomed to, we tend to misunderstand it, ignore it, or even destroy it.

The larger part of reality is beyond expression and will always remain so.

I guess you ask this question because I’m a Christian and that probably puts me in a minority—at least in the poetry world. My faith takes primacy over all other relationships or activities, including poetry. Nothing is more important than one’s relationship to God. I don’t see my poetry as a vehicle for proselytizing, but I do strive to say nothing that contradicts my faith.

I think academics are absurdly obsessed with the theory that "the medium is the message." Its applicability has limits. For example, there is an electronic version of my book, but there is no such thing as "electronic poetry." The poems are made out of words, not electronics. Electronics are a means of transmission; they are not the poetry. We don’t call poems printed in magazines "paper-poems." There’s no reason to think of poems printed in an e-book as "electronic poems."

Culture and history are the context in which poems are written and read. Allusion is one way poems reveal our cultural history and preserve it. Allusion is also, ironically, a way of having a sense of the future. It shows the traditional in a modern context, which is like having a point A and B on a graph and hypothesizing a point C. It is by this that we can plot our trajectory into the future, the future of how we identify ourselves. And identity is what culture is all about.