Tryst has turned towards more personal territory, mentioning family in several poems.There seems to be a little more of a narrative thread, too. Do you view these newer works as a departure or evolution in your writing?

I’m not sure I know the answer to your question at this point, but at the moment I’m thinking that these newer territories are an evolution/extension of my previous poems. One of the reasons I say this is that both of the things you mention — the “more personal” and the inclusion of a little more narrative — just showed up in my work; it wasn’t a conscious decision to include more of either. My poems have always felt — to me — already so intensely personal, although I can certainly understand their not coming across that way, in any conventional sense, to a reader.

But I think I’ve always been uneasy with “personal” detail and “narrative thread” in a poem, mostly because of their tendency to claim some “authentic” realm of experience that doesn’t feel to me to be the experience the poem is really enacting or giving rise to. In any case, I’m intrigued by the way that a bit more of the personal and narrative have entered the poems — and my guess is that the narrative has trailed in behind the “personal” details and events. I don’t think, however, that my newer poems have any more of an overall narrative structure, even though they contain narrative moments. I’m sure, too, that getting older necessarily creates more distance, an eerie simultaneous embracing of and estrangement from the personal details and events of early life, and that that distance enables all of those things to appear in different contexts. The writer Jeanette Winterson, in a recent essay, says something that seems to me to be related to the kind of “narrative” I’m most interested in; she writes, “Every work of art is an attempt to bring into being the object of loss.”

“Heart” melds the curious anecdote of the brain with a recollection. The tenacity of a seemingly precocious child, the parents waiting in the car — almost a reversal of what one might expect from family vacations — is delightful, but also tinged with a certain sadness. Is a mixing of tones and topics vital to your process?

Yes, when I look at my work, it does seems that my poems are often structured by a mixing of tones and topics, although, again, my sense is that those mixtures and layers of things and experiences are already what constitute the world and our experience of it so that the job of the poem is to heighten our experience of our experience in some way. As Baudelaire says, “The only way to inhabit the present is to revisit it in a work of art.”

In “Heart,” the scientific and anthropological details regarding the eating of dead relatives lead to the memory of the mother and the inevitable question posed by the poem of what her heart would taste like, which is another way of talking about the complexities and difficulties of intimacy with, and the ultimate loss of, the mother. So the image of the parents waiting in the car like “daguerreotypes” — fixed, immobile, and isolated from the speaker — works, I think, something like a metaphysical conceit, zooming back to the child’s search for some ideal “antebellum” place and then to the image of Mary grieving for the dead Christ: the sense of loss and separation culminate and break through at that moment, that jarring turn in the poem, with the lines “this what’s the matter / of the cerebellum.”

What do you look forward to in your next work?

Well, I mostly look forward to just having new poems arrive, whatever they might be. Much of my new work, though, does seem to be very interested in Dante, especially his Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Dante — in completely unpredictable ways — somehow got into the poems of my most recent book, Tryst. And now he’s kind of taken over. What’s compelling for me, continually, is the way in which the world of Dante and the contemporary world — Marlon Brando, even — speak to each other.