In the poem, “Monastery Nights” one of many great pieces from the 2005 collection Dog Language, you write about the self and wanting to know “what I was.” How would you define the self at this point?

For me, it’s the Big Question. I know “who” I am the way anyone does: I’m an aggregate of history, memory, sense perception, emotion, etc. But if you pick those things apart, what holds them together? Nothing! I’ve come to see, primarily through my study of Zen, that what I have always considered to be my “self” is in fact a phantom, an illusion created and maintained by me, which keeps me from realizing my true nature, which is (and I’m going out on a long limb here) pure consciousness of the interdependency of all things, just as they are. We’re all in this together, and every time I perceive myself as separate, I blind myself.

In your work there is immediacy, clarity and unflinching honesty, as in the poem “Road Tar” from The Snow Watcher (1998) in which you write about a squirrel on a road trying to free itself from its crushed hindquarters, an excruciatingly alive image. This is a poem in which the imagery and context painfully speak for themselves and the speaker takes a back seat. Is this kind of poem more challenging to write than one in which there is a more direct rendering of the narrator/self?

That poem is interested in the way things get memorialized. Specifically, how the visual memory of a run-over squirrel is forever linked with the taste of road tar, which, for those who haven’t read the poem, the speaker remembers tasting because a kid said you could chew it like gum. The poem brings together two things that in “real life” had no relation (were made up details, or happened at different times in different places) but the mind joins them. Why? The poem asks, Is this how “[a] girl with a burned tongue was conceived” ?

When Practice of Poetry was released in 1992 and became a bestseller, were you and co-author Robin Behn surprised by its success?

We knew there was a need for it. Teachers are always sharing exercises, and there was no central source. Also, new teachers of creative writing had very limited texts from which to work. There were plenty (Western Wind by John Frederick Nims being my favorite) of excellent how-to-read-poetry books, but not much on the subject of the nuts and bolts of how poems are actually made. We never intended the book to have such a long life, though. We saw it as a springboard from which teachers would evolve their own variations. Good exercises mutate and adapt themselves to a constantly-changing audience.