Poems, I tell my students, are like trips we take on a plane, but with an important difference.

When I get on a plane, I want a smooth ride to a clear destination and I want to return exactly to where I started.

If a poem works that way, I’m likely to be disappointed.

I want the poem to be hijacked by language and a chain of associations.

If that poem is booked to London, I want it detoured to Algiers or Lyon or Hackensack or Venus. I want an unexpected journey not a predictable roundtrip.

Thus speaks the fiction writer. . . .