The question of poetics, the implicit and explicit presumptions, prejudices and beliefs that orient the production of poetry, is, for me (and, I imagine, others) a vexed one. On the one hand I am quite aware of the conscious decisions and procedures that I deployed to write my first and second published books, c.c. and On Spec. On the other hand, my third published book, The Hero Project of the Century, is a collection of poems in the most traditional sense of the word: poems written more or less independently of one another, poems that were written with no sense that they would necessarily come together as a book or find themselves in the same book. This is all “true” as far as explicit, conscious decisions are concerned. However, I, like others, know that the work I’ve written is driven, finally, by a small set of implicit concerns, their formal differences notwithstanding, concerns I only recognize as a “small set” in retrospect, after the fact of their materialization as acts of writing.