In your book, The Poetry Home Repair Manual, you mention that a poem could go through 30-40 revisions. Can you say something about your revision process?

Nearly all of my revision has a couple of directions. One is from difficulty toward clarity, and another is from wordiness to economy. The rest is working with the hundreds of other decisions, such as which is the best word, what kind of punctuation mark is needed, and so on. The passage of time is very useful, as things keep coming to light as time goes by, and sometimes I find myself revisiting poems after a week or so just to see if I notice anything that needs fixing, and I usually do.

Some poets admit they sometimes submit work too soon, before they are truly ready. How do you know when a poem is ready?

I usually don’t send poems out to journals until I’ve had them around for a month or six weeks. By then they’re probably as good as I’m going to get them to be. I do have a tendency to send early drafts to friends to look at, in the enthusiasm of having just written something, and I often find that I’ve done that far too early.

There are many kinds of contemporary poetry being written: innovative, received forms, free verse, political, humorous, and so on. Is there an area of poetry you see as neglected or of which you would like to see more?

Not in a particular form or manner such as you describe, but I’d like to see poetry that pays more attention to how it may be received by a reader. I believe in being considerate of my readers, and not talking down to them or throwing things at them that they don’t have the ability to catch. A more generous poetry takes the reader into consideration.