How does the idea of place, something we love at River River Books, shape your collection?

Any sense of place in my work is subconscious and coincidental. I grew up in a leafy upper middle-class New Jersey suburb of Philadelphia; then Ann Arbor, Michigan; next north shore Long Island, with repeated vacation stays in Nova Scotia and the Scottish Isle of Barra in the Hebrides. For the last 50+ years I’ve lived in the tiny town of Hardwick, Vermont.

What is a poem that you see as a particular driving force in your collection, and why?

I’m not consciously aware of any one poem driving the book as a whole, nor of any one for any section as a unit. There’s a loose progression from infancy to death. 

What was a significant revision that occurred along the way?

My process is poem-driven. I write single poems one at a time. When one seems good enough, I submit it to journals. If/when one gets published I put it in the Next Book file, where they accumulate alphabetically by title. Once there’s 50 I start arranging them, sometimes on paper all over the floor. The poems suggest which other poems they want to hang out with, and why. I eavesdrop on them together and gradually overhear what their sections want to be. Outcasts go into the file towards yet another book maybe. Newcomers join if/where they are welcomed. 

At what stage did your final title emerge—early, late? How did it help with your collection’s conception?

I followed the convention of discovering the title somewhere in a then so-called Title Poem. I like this title because it comes early enough that you can forget about it until after it gets earned.

What’s something you wish every reader could know about you as the writer of your book?

I write from language, approximately never from subject matter. Words and phrases flap about us all the time like pterodactyls, I should be so lucky if one starts up a nest in my hair. I keep notebooks and other jottings of words, phrases, 2 lines, hundreds of them. I scan & coax, drop trails of crumbs. My writing group sometimes helps me to get this & that together into a poem with subject matter. I try hard to postpone subject matter until the last step. Pterodactyl egg.