[The tangle: sentiment, feeling, narrative, storymaking, storytelling, autobiography, confession, sentimentality, revelation, manipulation, relationship with audience, translation of experience, birth.]

1. First of all, I wanted to write experience. Wanted to make a writing that would enact experience, not write “about” things, which was very much out of vogue when I studied at Iowa under Jorie Graham. I believed that poetry was better than prose in that poems could enact rather than recount experience and while I believed in the power of stories, I felt that storymaking always involved a lie but that poems could be true.