SMITH: I started as a reader, a lover of Homer and all the other rousing stories. When I was in college I gravitated to Camus, Kafka, Dostoevsky, all of whom were exotic to me. Joyce, too. I loved Ulysses, probably for all the wrong reasons. Later, after a stint of acting when I wasn't teaching and coaching, I began to think I wanted to do something artistic, though my limitations on stage were already evident. I had written journalism is college and thought myself pretty clever with words, so I decided to pursue it.

LESLIE: When you began writing poetry, were there particular figures that influenced your work?

SMITH: At 25 or so I stumbled on Merwin and Dickey, and the doors of perception were opened wide. Sylvia Plath was also an early find, and I realized that these writers saw words as physical things, as I did, as totems as much as means to an end. I had read a little Faulkner and O'Connor, but when I went to grad school at Appalachian State, I also found Warren and the metaphysicals. Isn't Donne one of the paths many of the Fugitives took? Of course, back then, I didn't know that.

LESLIE: Are these figures still influences, or do you think the impact of their pull upon your work has lessened (or strengthened) somewhat?

SMITH: I think the ones who have lasted have gone underground, sub rosa. I remember an early review in The Hollins Critic that suggested I might be the next James Dickey. Flattered as I was by the comparison, we don't need two Dickeys, or two anybody else. I remembered what O'Connor said about not wanting to have her mule stalled on the track's when Faulkner's Dixie Limited came roaring through, so I stopped even reading Big Jim for a while. Now, for similar reasons, I have to give Heaney a wide path. But for a while Eavan Boland was a great influence, but she's too much herself to allow into your own center.

LESLIE: I'm always struck by the emergence of nature in your work, especially in The Cardinal Heart, Hunter-Gatherer, and Brightwood. Why do you think you are drawn to the natural world as a subject matter for your poetry?

SMITH: I love to be outdoors, which has led me both to a kind of cracker bucolic, which naturally gives birth to the impulse to subvert that subgenre. I don't think I'm a very social person, so for much of the time when I'm not at work, my wife is about all the company I yearn for, and I like to walk about in the woods and on the hills and just name things, the right names or my own names. In Carolyn Kizer's poem "Plaint of the Poet in an Ignorant Age," she years for a flower boy and a bug boy to give her the names "while hundreds of metaphors doze out of doors, and the no bird sings in the no name tree." I hope I'm quoting that about right, but to be caught in that charmed space between the named and the nameless, that happens to me most when I on the move and under the sky. Last night I just realized that when Orion starts to just skirt along the tips of our trees to the south, the daddy longlegs start to show up. It's natural. I'm absorbed by those things Yeats means when he says "whatever if begotten, born, and dies."

LESLIE: How do you think place affects your work?

SMITH: I'm much more a physical than a cerebral being, and the body has to be somewhere. It's the way my spirit gets to find stimuli. The eyes, the tongue, the skin -- I love physical sensations, so long as they're not pain. And every place offers its own lore and language, its own music. I'm compulsively attached to privately charmed places. The painter Walter Anderson called them nullas. I don't know where he got that word, but I use it. They're like safety stations, a rabbit's maze. Under a certain tree, at a particular bend in the Maury River. Some places have the genius locus who talks to me.

LESLIE: I was interested to read your reference to and expansion of John Ciardi's point regarding poetry involving the whole body in your Poetry Daily essay "O Body Swayed to Music." Is this an idea that you see influencing your own work?

SMITH: So much of the word is breath, the basic phoneme. I say my work aloud a lot like some self-tranced ninny because I love to be in the visceral grip of speech. Just think of the pleasure of saying "the shapes a bright container can contain" or "stately plump Buck Mulligan." Acting, teaching, orating -- it's all a part of some auto-hypnosis I practice to keep myself from fixating on the commercial and political worlds, which can drive me near the edge.

LESLIE: Do you find your fiction influencing your poetry and vice versa? When you are in the initial composition stage, how do you know whether you will turn to fiction or poetry as your means of expression?

SMITH: When I have an idea that has enough narrative, drama and lyric pitch that it could go either way, it's deciding where I want to enter the story that tells me if it will be a story or a poem. Lately, my stories are very tightly sung (sometimes too much, some editors tell me) and my poems so extensive, that I'm in danger of losing my sense of genre. Right now I'm thinking about Edgar Rice Burroughs when he visited Twain's. Will it be a story or a poem? Depends to some degree on whether he has one of those solo epiphanies or encounters another person. Then I should know which fork I'll take, but sometimes I'll go both ways. I have an old sestina about a correspondence (and called "Correspondences") I carried on with a prisoner, and just three years ago I wrote it as a pretty long story. It's just called "Correspondence." This may not be a rational way to proceed. Another little narrative about living across the road from a drive-in theater was a story first, then a poem. Go figure.

LESLIE: You have commented elsewhere that you think of yourself as a Southern writer, but that you also have engaged yourself since your employment at Washington and Lee in the particularities of Appalachian writing. Robert Penn Warren and Flannery O'Connor among others have commented upon regionalism comprehensively, but I'm curious to hear your view on this-does regionalism have limitations?

SMITH: Dante said he wanted to write in a language that would be understood by the people gathered around the town pump. He wanted his language to have a local habitation and a name, but nobody wants to call him a regionalism. The SITE of a work is just the place where the stone enters the water, but if the ripples don't radiate very far, we call it regional, even provincial. If the rock is big enough and the water in the right mood, the rings just keep going. That's what I hope for -- a local hit that travels well. I used to live in Boone and shared a place in Mitchell County for a while with an old buddy, so I've been mountain-struck for a long time. Living in Lexington (after 19 years on the plains of Auburn, Alabama) just re-awoke me to Wild Bill Blake's "Great things are done when men and mountains meet./ This is not done by jostling in the street." So yes, regionalism has limitations, but I think they're far fewer than the limitations of many other isms, like experimentalism.

LESLIE: Do you think the status of Southern literature today is still underrated? In your opinion is Southern writing thriving or starving?

SMITH: If you remove the great Southern fiction writers from the landscape of American literature, anybody who's not asleep or too angry about something to be attentive will notice that the map changes dramatically, and for the worst. I don't think Faulkner and, McCarthy and their ilk (if they have an ilk) are in danger of undervaluation, but Southern poets are in a different situation, I suspect. For so long it was mostly a men's club, and I think that has offended a fair few folks. White men. But that's changing, and if you don't know Fred Chappell, Kay Byer, Natasha Trethewey, Yusef Komunyakaa and Betty Adcock, you've got to change your life! Southern literature is vigorous and multifoliate - C. K. Wright and Charles Wright! The reader who shuns the work of these poets is just missing a lot of the feast.

LESLIE: How much do you consider “form” in your own work? Does content lead to form, or vice versa?

SMITH: It’s always a mysterious transaction for me, the interplay between form and information, manner and matter. I think of a vessel and a fluid substance it might “contain” altering one another. As you explore the nature of the theme and imagery, the texture of the language, the vessel alters to accommodate surprises, but as the vessel alters, it also affects the nature of the fluid it accepts. Round and round, until there’s a centrifugal force, a kind of spell, and something in you recognizes how the two begin to integrate and cooperate. Connotation, denotation, scheme and current interweave, and I hope this awkward metaphor signals at least that I see the making of a poem as an extended process during which things change as the poet discovers direction and impetus. Intention and improvisation are both important. As Borges said, “algebra and fire.”

One afternoon when I was in graduate school I was one of several neophytes interrogating W. S. Merwin – this was back in the ancient seventies – and I was much taken with his newest book Writings for an Unfinished Accompaniment. He’d come a long way from the rondeaus and villanelles of his earliest collections, and I (with a highly refined ignorance that now astonishes me) asked when and why he had decided to abandon (I probably said “eschew” or “refuse”!) form. Well, William has always been a gentle man, so he smiled and quietly said that he never did, that every made thing finds a form, and that he had perhaps moved from the more recognizable ones to the more necessary ones. At least, that’s how I remember it, with me learning how right Twain was to say that “man is the only animal that blushes, or needs to.”

Form, is one of the much-examined mysteries. Instinct matters. And yet, I’m also a counter. How many lines in a stanza, syllables or accents in a line, nouns or verbs in a stanza. Numbers are not the law, but they are lawful and welcome. As I work my way through the drafts of a poem, I begin to gain confidence in one or another set of ratios, which correspond in part to what I’ll boldly call the poem’s musical imperatives. I may try the poem in different shaped stanzas or with different line lengths before I settle on what I finally type up. Do I expect anyone else to “get” the dynamic I’ve opted for? Best not to have expectations, but some readers do. And even after all that flex and twist, the riddled shadow of iambic pentameter is often easy for the forensic poetaster to suss out.

A little note on prosody, since it has such a stallion impact on form. No matter how I think about metrical variations, changes of pace, caesuras or variant pitches of vowels, I’m always wrestling with the way the poetic line and the (usually narrative) sentence exist in dynamic tension. I want almost every line to end on a word whose meaning and grammatical role confer emphasis. Trellis and vine, right brain and left – a kind of semantic isometrics.

So I don’t usually have a fixed form to pour my ideas and images into, and I don’t have a prescribed meaning which will dictate the architecture of a poem. Or a story: my method isn’t terribly different from verse to prose. I suppose I’m still conducting my own private experiment concerning the shifty boundaries between a story and a poem, and even in prose paragraphs, Williams’ “something must measure” makes too much sense to discount it.

LESLIE: Some have said that MFA programs tend to produce homogonous work. What is your opinion of this?

SMITH: Anyone who wants his or her edges ground down into an easy fit will find a community to do it. MFA programs have that effect on some people, but a strong voice will gather up the chorus and lead them. Unfortunately, MFA programs are in the business of carrying on a business, so they encourage writers who aren't promising yet, probably telling them soon that they're wonderful and possibly suggesting (if only by example) that a writer can network himself or herself into a "career," which may be why some gravitate to such places. Some great writers and teachers hold forth in MFA programs, and some of the other kind, too. They turn out the whole spectrum, but it's not so easy to get all this out of subjective territory. I'm all for the circus performance model: those who fall need the net, but the crowd can't be fooled into believing that falling is just a cool part of the repertoire. But here I've probably already told you more than I even know.

LESLIE: A number of publishers seem to be shutting down, or have been gobbled up while new "micro-presses" crop up regularly. What is your view of the publishing business these days?

SMITH: It's difficult to navigate a landscape undergoing such tectonic shifts. I have on hand a completed book of stories (which my agent is peddling about) and a completed book of poems, plus a New and Selected Poems really ready to show, and I have no idea who will publish any of them. Between the fluctuating business world and the unpredictable shifts in the web, publish on demand options, the lure of cottage industry antics, I get up each morning wondering if the jays will be two-winged blue things or tiger-striped creatures with six legs and gills. Really, I'm bewildered. Some of the old reliable university presses have changed staffs and are buckling under the weight of their previous directors'(sometimes misplaced) ambitions, I don't know who is really an open shop anymore. The whole option of the contests is pretty depressing to me, but I should add that my wife, Sarah Kennedy (Flow Blue, Double Exposure, Consider the Lilies) has proven that sometimes judges don't select winners by their pedigree so much as by the quality of their work. Remembering that makes me feel a little more hopeful.

LESLIE: I know you have expressed distaste for the poetry-slam mentality of some public poetry readings. Do you enjoy reading your own work in public? Is it something that energizes your work?

SMITH: I like to present public readings when the audience is comprised of volunteers, rather than conscripts, but I'm wary of my inclination to entertain between poems. I want the overall occasion to be sociable and relaxed, but I want to make the actual reading of a poem something of a shared meditation, a herd rumination, if I can be cervine about it. The two poetry slams I've been to were great occasions for a certain quite narrow kind of confessional/political/windy sort of poetry, and they were robust, but there seemed to be little opportunity for the quiet nuance, the compressed metaphor and the tightly woven, deep textured poetry which is central to my own poetic appetite. I think Whitman-like witnessing would have thrived in them, but any venue that really doesn't create a viable space for Dickinsonian telling it slant isn't going to be wholly satisfactory to me. One slam I attended seemed to be fueled by binge drinking and binge extemporizing, and my entire interest in architecture quickly narrowed to the question "Where's the nearest door?"

LESLIE: Back to your work itself. Congratulations on the attention that "Docent" received recently-its inclusion in last year's Best American Short Stories and New Stories from the South is a real achievement, and it really is a unique story. Can you tell me a bit more about the genesis of "Docent"?

SMITH: I made it up. Really. I've been in some museums whose guides were more forthcoming than I cared for, and sometimes their enthusiasm for the historical or aesthetic artifacts was exceeded only by their enthusiasm for their own private stories, but the narrator of that monologue is a hybrid creature patched together from my worst experiences and my worst dreams. I decided to set the story in the Lee Chapel at Washington and Lee just because that's the museum I know best these days. They don't have any employees or intruders or even ghosts who remotely resemble Miss Sibby, but I guess no good deed goes unpunished, so I conjured her right there. I don't know what was the actual trigger to start inventing this story, but I was on one of those little twin engine flights that make you yearn for a pedestrian travel, and we began to tremble and shake like a Holiness meeting. To get my mind off the immediate commotion, I started making up this character, simmering down in the sound of her riff, and when I arrived at my destination with my heart intact and my trousers dry, I decided I owed it to her to coax her forth even further. It was great fun to write, and the audio versions of those two anthologies offer up really first-rate performances of the story. Some people don't care for the fact that it doesn't have much suspense and there's no character you want to identify with, but I figure there's room for a couple such narratives, at least on my hard drive.

LESLIE: I have noticed a real character-driven aspect in your poetry as well, particularly in The Hollow Log Lounge. Your work is also rife with humor. Do you think humor is an underappreciated aspect of poetry?

SMITH: Here's a place where I think Southern poets may have been a little ahead of the curve. The humor in Fred Chappell, Jim Whitehead, Jonathan Williams, Dickey, Richard Dillard, Henry Taylor, George Garrett, Susan Ludvigson, Rodney Jones and Andrew Hudgins -- wow, that's just a start. And we all owe a lot to Billy Collins for bringing the humor to the center. An abundance of poets are rippingly funny in an oblique way, but I'm happy to see that more versicators are willing to dodge the temptation to be cryptic. Not much humor in the Cuisinart poetry of the desperately impressive. Humor requires both ambiguity and clarity, and aiming for it is a good tonic. Nonetheless, I wish I had a slice of pie for every time I've aimed to be funny and fallen flat. But they don't give pie for that.

LESLIE: Speaking of characters, The Hollow Log Lounge introduces the reader to so many intriguing figures. Where did these voices come from exactly?

SMITH: I made it up. I know I've said that before, but it comes from grave-robbing, ventriloquism, importation, observation and the knee-knocking blind staggers. In the honky-tonk world of my ancient past, I collected a lot of images of people and snippets of language, cut and pasted and perverted things to my own ends to the point that few would be able to identify which character started out as a voodoo doll of an ex-wife, which was born as an analysis of a colleague and which ones are embellishments on people I actually met at the Hollow Log Lounge, which really existed once upon a time in Opelika, Alabama. I didn't know I was writing a whole book of those things till I was well over halfway done and I began to be enchanted by what might be said overtly and by example about down-home music and those of us who can abide it. THHL was a chapbook of rough, mediocre poems in its first manifestation, and I thought I was done, but somehow the great play of it, the theatrical event in my mind, kept unfolding. Once Robert Overstreet produced an early selection of the poems as a reader’s theater production at Auburn, and once I saw those people on stage complete with music and lights and sneers and mule-bray laughter, they kept inviting their neighbors into my mind. Then Larry Lieberman at Illinois came along and liked it. Now if I could just get those characters registered to vote . . . .

LESLIE: I'd also like to ask you about Ireland. The poems in Trespasser and Messenger are both at least partially based on your journeys to Ireland. What brought about your interest in Ireland? Was it difficult to write poems based on a foreign country?

SMITH: I wrote on Joyce in my undergraduate thesis, something about Stephen and Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, so Irish literature has long appealed to me, but I went to Ireland back in the late eighties just because I had a leave from teaching, and an acquaintance knew someone with rooms to rent in Galway. It was a hard time for me, both physically and emotionally. I had been suffering from all manner of self doubts, as well as some kind of rare virus that kept me losing weight and kept the doctors occupied with fancy theories. When I arrived in October, Galway was being blasted by early winter, relieved only but the mass exodus of almost all Americans. I quickly threw in my lot with traditional Irish musicians and the poets constellating around Salmon Press and began to swim in the strange but somehow familiar Celtic culture. It was a full immersion experience, I'll tell you, and I read my way through dozens of books of Irish literature and history, played music in the pubs, pilgrimed to old ring forts and islands, holts and caves and coves and dives. I learned about Irish jokes, which are not jokes about dipsomaniac Paddies, but more like this: "Why did the sun never set on the British Empire?" "Because God wouldn't trust the buggars in the dark." Only it wasn't "buggars." So I was learning a new torque in the language ("thrawn," the Irish would have it), as well as new tunings and new attitudes. The Gristle poems in Trespasser came out of my determination to tell something autobiographical but "slant" and allegorical, as allegory is one of my natural habits. In the end, it was neither harder nor easier than writing poems in and about the South. Which is to say that it was hard!

LESLIE: History also seems to play a prominent role in your work as well. Is this a subject matter to which you find yourself innately drawn?

SMITH: Maybe I should have been a historian, except that I'm immediately drawn to those sleeper zones where history is either silent or enigmatic. And I think too much history for my taste is shaped in libraries. For my poem "Cherries" in Brightwood, I not only read everybody from Catton to Shaara to Foote Sears and even that ninny Gingrich on the Battle of Gettysburg, but I had to walk the ground, sleep in the grove, climb Little Round Top and hunker down in Devil's Den. By the time I've engaged thataway, I start to invent. I was talking to a historian the other day who couldn't imagine why I wanted to get distances and times and so on accurate in a short story, because after all, it's "only fiction." Well, I aim for credibility, a viable surround to build up the reader's confidence and then leave me imaginative space to foist a great invention, what I think might have or should have happened. And you know, history is always great for reading, because -- as with Cabeza de Vaca or Grant or Pepys -- the writers of history have their own myths and fictions to offer, whether they know it or not. This may trouble some people, but it just makes me want to dance.

LESLIE: I've noticed several of your collections take on a larger theme or have a connecting thread (for instance the characters in The Hollow Log Lounge) Do you conceptualize the entire book when you are writing each poem?

SMITH: I know poets like Claudia Emerson or my wife Sarah who are very deliberately writing books, sequences, suites, and I admire it. I eventually began to emulate them with Hollow Log, once it was deeply underway and unstoppable, and I had already done something of the same thing with Trespasser, but mostly I just write at random with the attitude "let God sort em out." Of course, he won't, and then I'm stuck with sifting and discarding, filling in gaps and pretending that certain things match. It's in the selecting, the triage and last rites that I actually shape a book. It's definitely night work and a mystery after the fact. I'm glad if it looks as if I know what I'm doing in advance.

LESLIE: Does editing Shenandoah ever influence your own poetry or fiction?

SMITH: There's a certain rigor and a temptation toward cynicism that comes with editing. I know that reading manuscripts makes me want to burn anything I've written that I'd be inclined to reject. In the end, though, editing a long-standing and reputable journal like Shenandoah resembles teaching: you receive a lot of stimulus, and you're exhausted, but it re-invigorates you, as well. I am glad not to have been teaching freshman composition for the past ten years, and I feel lucky that things which come in the mail remind me why writing imaginatively is important. We're so densely surrounded by words that have been spent on us with dishonest purposes, poetry and fiction are necessary to let in the air and light, sweetness and light, I guess. For the chance to participate in that relief in any way, praise be.

LESLIE: How did you wind up at Shenandoah, and in fact, how did a small undergraduate college get such a widely-respected magazine?

SMITH: I had been the writer-in-residence at Auburn and a tenured Professor of English, as well as co-editor of Southern Humanities Review. When Dabney Stuart decided to step down from the editorship of Shenandoah, a mutual friend told him that I was interested in leaving Alabama and alerted me that the job was opening. I’d been an admirer of the magazine for years, and when Dabney called me to encourage my application, I decided to throw my hat in the ring. I guess the search committee liked the hat.

The genesis of Shenandoah is another matter. As I expect you know, Washington and Lee has always striven for excellence and has refused to settle for the predictable profile of an exclusive Rebel Ivy. One look at the school’s Shepherd Poverty Program, the marvelous theater arts facilities or its international studies program will confirm that, and Shenandoah has been a prominent part of that equation since 1950 when Tom Wolfe, William Hoffman and some others said, “Let’s create a magazine.” The growth of the journal into a national and even international presence is due in part to two editors, a student named Tom Carter and a faculty member named Jim Boatwright. They shaped the powerful legacy that my student interns and I work to sustain and extend with every issue.

LESLIE: Taking your experience as an editor and teacher into account, what is the “form” of poetry today?

SMITH: As an editor, it’s easy to get discouraged, and you begin to wish you’d been an archeologist or a—something—luge racer? So much of the work sent to Shenandoah just doesn’t much appeal to me, much less enchant or excite me. And then there’s the saving poem, that universal solvent that arrives unbidden and unexpected, that heals and saves and confirms your criteria. Let me confess to being a neoclarificationist. I used to know who coined that term. I yearn for a recognizable rhetorical situation, a contract between the writer and reader that implies that the game will be worth the candle. I want tropes and figures, symmetries and transitions, tonal modulations and structures that invite readers rather than taunt them. I’m all for the idea that a poem should challenge a reader, but I think both the popular, fragmented “the-center-cannot-hold” poems and complete self-immersion, referentially and psychologically evasive poems are almost all narcissistic refusals to engage with a particular genre and an imaginable audience. Shelley (I think) said that a poem must assert its own rules and abide by them, but I find that this imperative, taken alone, has generated some real strange contraptions? Anyway, the tilt-o-whirl is a popular ride for ambitious poets, but I can’t resist a poem that tells a musical, vivid story on the surface but with allusions and etymological connections that mesh and knot beyond plot level. A historical, rather than immediate, frame of reference. The river of big C culture rather than the breeze of pop culture.

What poem might save your life? That’s the one I’m really hungry for, not just the astute or amusing or adroit one, which is not to say that the charge of personal passion has more voltage than the restrained meditation. But I am weary of poets whose emotional vocabulary suggests that the only window they look through is a mirror.

Perhaps the best way to anchor this denigration of poems driven by theory and meant to be read by graduate committees meeting in dungeons is for me to say who among contemporaries moves me. One can look into the pages of Shenandoah for a partial answer, but I’ll confess to serious fondness for the writing of Charles Wright, Alice Friman, Rita Dove, Claudia Emerson, David Kirby, Brendan Galvin, Rodney Jones, Kay Byer, Bob Wrigley, Carolyn Kizer. Too old for many young readers? Steve Scafidi, Natasha Trethewey, Lyrae Van Cleif-Stefanon, Steve Gehrke, Ted Genoways, Katherine Smith (no relation, but my wife Sarah Kennedy belongs on this list and would be here if I were not too tactful to include her).

I can describe the personae of these people’s poems as human voices, or maybe the mermaids speaking each to each, but the language has an inviting trajectory, an emotional tremolo, a disciplined hunger for something much more elusive and precious than publication and tenure and autobiographical basking. In contrast, I encounter – read and reject – an abundance of poetry that reminds me of some arrested adult playing air guitar in a student show. Nobody can swear the participant makes an error, as it’s just pantomime of vitality, but nobody hears music from it either. I admit that my needs and appetites still evolve, and right now I’m in the mood for poems that employ recognizable historical and spiritual contexts. The pure lyric twang of the private bowstring is not at the top of my present priorities.

Lest I sound too literal and simple-minded, I willing to suspend judgment until a poem begins to reveal its secrets. When Donne begins “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” I’m happy to allow his opening, complex metaphor some time to achieve traction in my mind. The opening of Dickey’s “The Celebration” – “All wheels. A man breathed fire.” – is dislocating and enigmatic, but I quickly begin to see the setting and the drama, the nature of the conflict which crackles inside the narrator but is connected to something outside him, as well. And a cryptic poet like Dickinson will reward substantial excavation, as the world the voice comes from is not at all solipsistic. Right now, I feel the desire to be gnomic and multi-referential is rampant, and I find I enjoy the results in poetry much less than in fiction. I can’t completely explain that. If I were completely lacking in diplomacy and not an editor whose goal is to survey as much of everything as possible in the shaping of Shenandoah, I’d name some names of these anathemas here, the post-this and post-that “experimentalists” whose poetry demands and promises far more than it rewards, but you can probably supply a list, and most of the poetry of any given era is not only unskillful and unworked, but most of it is unlikely to conform to the eccentric taste of any weary, beauty-seeking contrarian.

LESLIE: In an era when the very definition of poetry is much debated, what qualities of language guide you in your own writing and your assessment of other writers’ poems?

SMITH: The rhythmic component is still crucial to me, though my prosody is clearly not strictly a metric matter. For me, the decasyllabic pentameter is still the fundamental grid against which things are modeled, but the ways it can be varied, subverted, compromised and twisted are uncountable, and the vine that I try to trellis across that structure usually involves the cadences of human speech, whether on the tongue or in the mind. Beyond rhythm, I’m drawn to compressed language, sustained metaphor, rhyme (internal at least as frequently as end), psychological intricacy, drama, a quality of the mythic and interplays of sound repetition, what Brooks and Warren called a “tangled glitter of syllables.” I also aspire to that quiet species of syntactic altering that announces: this is not prose or conversation. You know how Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” doesn’t begin, “I think I know whose woods these are.” He reverses the predictable order to create an authoritative sense. When a poet has the reins that surely in hand, you know he or she will be in control; saddle or bareback, the poet will determine destination and pace.

LESLIE: Lastly, out of the books you have written, is there one in particular that is closest to your heart? Do you have a favorite?