It's
kind of a combination. I don't think too far ahead. I certainly don't determine
the tone. I might have a subject matter, say with that “Statues in the Park,”
I knew that the subject of the poem was going to be statues in the park. It
might have drifted away from that at some point. But I never know where a
turn is going to take place. Turns or shifts are very necessary in my poems
because the beginnings of my poems are uninteresting. Sometimes I know, here
is the subject, statues in the park. But I never know the resolution. And
I would say that 90 percent of the thrill of writing is moving toward an unknown
destination which you are actually going to create. The poem is kind of a
pathway to its ending. It's the only way to access its own ending and that
progress through the poem to the ending is the most compelling part of writing
for me.