Poetry is a kind of distilled insinuation. It's a way of expanding and talking around an idea or a question. Sometimes, more actually gets said through such a technique than a full frontal assault.
I like the irony in my work.
It's an astonishing skill that people can read, and read well. Very few people can read well. For instance, I have to be very careful with irony, saying something while meaning the exact opposite.
Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that's where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page.
A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.
I think art is communication. To that extent, it can be the words between the words. It has a possibility of communicating something more than people can do with prose or just talking.
If you're really listening there are alot of hidden messages in my songs.
Sometimes a word is found so right it trembles at the slightest explanation.
You explain nothing, O poet, but thanks to you all things become explicable.
There are really so many subtleties of meaning and observation that very often are not expressed by writers.
Of course I want to have a deliciously seductive story on the surface which will keep people engaged and amused, but primarily, I'm interested in other things. It's the texture of any given moment that fascinates me: what is really going on between people or in somebody's mind.
