This way of working is striking, and for some readers, perhaps even antithetical or radical (especially in light of the contemporary rush toward a completed product)…

It doesn’t seem radical to me. It seems like most poets I know are working on long poems or projects. There may be people who don’t like or don’t use the word “project,” but I can’t see how poetry — individual poems or single long poems and everything in between — can not be a long-term task. I prefer to avoid rushing toward a completed project mainly because I am such a slow writer anyway. If the project is huge, and I know it will take me a year or two to write it, then a month of not writing or a stalled section or research that goes nowhere — these don’t seem like great tragedies in the larger scheme of a big project. The long haul is easier for me. The roomier a poem is, the better. How much can we fit in there? And for how long can we work on it? The more and the longer the better. Perhaps the long poem avoids anxiety about completion about the next project. Also, for me, research demands the long poem. It takes a long time for the project to become a product. Maybe that’s a good thing.

All three of your books reveal an affinity toward the prose poem. What attracts you to this form?

Oddly, margins draw me to the prose poem. While the margins or the white space are larger if one uses shorter lines and left justification, I just love the sharp and crisp margins around the prose poem. A self-sufficient square. The wall of text. I like the pleasure of fitting hundreds of words on one page. I like the cake-and-eat-it-too-ness of the prose poem — my prose poems do have line breaks (even though it would be easier to let the margins break the lines automatically, I can’t stop myself from “fixing” those breaks with intentional ones — and I have been trying to not do this, but it’s hard to be laissez-faire about it).

There’s the shape of the text and the space for marginalia. For me this is the ideal… What’s better than a big wall of text with room to write more?

I started writing prose poems with regularity in bk of (h)rs, and that had a lot to do with the ekphrastic nature of that book — the shape of the text in medieval manuscripts, in books of hours. There’s the shape of the text and the space for marginalia. For me this is the ideal. In “Seeing Reading: Susan Howe’s Moving Margins,” Cole Swensen writes about margins as an “assertion of potential” and “an invitation to the reader to respond to the book.” What’s better than a big wall of text with room to write more?

The visual aspect of poetry seems important to you; are there other visual arts that have influenced you?

Not really. I wish I had an interesting answer to this. I am just a sucker for medieval art, literature, architecture, and so on. For my current project, I tried (am trying still) so hard to have a wide range (in time, style) of art for the ekphrastic sections, but I have ended up mostly writing after medieval images. It must be as much an emotional connection as it is an intellectual or artistic one, otherwise I would be able to explain it