1. The much-anticipated release of your fourth poetry collection What He Did in Solitary is sure to register as a significant event in contemporary American poetry. What are some elements of What He Did In Solitary that you view as distinctive from your earlier work?
AM: A book’s release is hardly an event—I’ve hardly marked when past ones came and went, but I can always hope the latest finds some sympathetic ears and kindred minds. Its continuities are yours to guess; I work, like Goethe, ohne hast, ohne ras at “fragments of a great confession”—yet each fragment is a whole, and of a set. If I have deepened my poetic speech or spread the sweep of my noetic reach, you know, not I—a poet never knows himself without descending into prose. These poems may be heavier: less chaff, more heft. (Though all my poems are game to laugh.)