Typing up the old poem I found myself unconsciously making little corrections, and then having to change them back to be like the original, so I think that’s a good place to start talking about how things have changed. The first thing is, I wouldn’t use punctuation like that now. I’ve got nothing against punctuation, I just have been trying to find ways not to use it when it isn’t necessary. I’m also more interested now in ways that lines can point both forward and backward a little. Nothing crazy, like the meaning can’t be gotten if you don’t read both forward and backward -- but I like that suspension of judgment that you can get reading a poem with no punctuation and lines that are short and insufficient unto themselves. An example is the lines

Line 1 moves pretty clearly into line 2. Line 3 could easily be a continuation of Line 2 – “solely in my mind when the sky seems holy”. Could be. But then Line 4 is only one word, and it seems to modify Line 3. Which probably means now we’re talking about a new phrase, which begins with Line 3. And so then by Line 5 the reader realizes that yes, this is the end of a phrase that begins with Line 3. There’s nothing complicated about that, and there’s really only the opportunity for one brief pause to wonder if Line 3 is the end or beginning of a phrase – a very brief pause. But for that small time, the mind is floating around waiting for certitude, waiting to lock into the meaning and move on. And I really like the feeling of floating over the poem like that. I don’t even do it as well as others -- I’m thinking about Eileen Myles, I think I learned a lot from reading her poems, in terms of how lines can work without punctuation. It feels like reading not just the words of the poem but the possibilities of the poem too.

Another obvious difference is the personification that happens in the first poem. Back then, I was quite adamant about the power of personification. I wasn’t even adamant, it was so self-evident to me that if I met someone who disagreed, I didn’t even bother trying to change their mind, like you wouldn’t if you met someone who said that you can’t get sugar from beets. It just seemed like everything else: it could be done well or not. Like country music. But now that is almost all gone. If I do it now it is like in the last poem of the first section of RISE UP, where I say “the room is gently lit by the green shirt you gave me” – so the shirt is more than a shirt, but it isn’t staring heart-broken into the reservoir.

When I look at the poems in A HUMMOCK IN THE MALOOKAS I see how many of the poems don’t have an “I” speaking them. I guess I’m a little bit happy about that. But now I’m more interested in an almost spoken sense of the line, and the kind of shimmery way that lines can point both forward and backwards, as I said, and that just seems to be easier in an “I” voiced poem. Also, I do think, as impotent as poetry is in terms of political speech, that it is good for you to write something in a coherent voice saying something coherent about the terrible reality of living in a complicit way with a greedy and immoral empire. I think it certainly isn’t bad for you to do that once in awhile.

I was going to say next that the title of THE WORLD JUST BEFORE THE AT EASE was longer and wordier than I would use now. But even though most of my titles are much simpler now, that’s not really true – I still like a long pretty ridiculous title now and then. RISE UP has both IN A BOWER OF ROEMARY and THE DARKNESS NEEDS A LITTLE SHOVE in it. So then I realized that the difference isn’t really the length but it’s in how involved the title is in the working of the poem. THE WORLD JUST BEFORE THE AT EASE does a little work for the poem – it sets it up, at least. It creates an a priori (and I don’t even think I know really what a priori means) situation or back story out of which the poem emerges. I think what’s happened is that the poems in my first book were more likely to be “about” something – I was more likely to have written a poem then that really made a point, and so I wanted to be sure it got across. Now I’m much less sure what my poems mean, and in fact have had the experience a few times recently reading aloud at a reading somewhere and having it essentially dawn on me what I’m saying as I’m reading it. Which is a little uncomfortable, having something get through to me only then, well after the book is out.