You have always shown a keen interest in the sound that your lines make. Can you say a few words about the role of sound in your poetics?

Upon first learning W.H. Auden’s definition of poetry as “memorable speech,” I thought, I can do that. Maybe. I am not the poet’s poet in the sense of great metaphors, startling images, extensive vocabulary and conciseness. I’m a talker.

But the words have to sing. My first writing inspiration was songs on the radio and record albums, not poetry on the page. It’s a whole-body thing. Some words and poems stick like glue to the page they’re printed on. They are one kind of poetry. Mine start as interior speech, ringing in my head, wanting to get out, and succeed best when they are spoken aloud.

It’s a music of sound and sense. The words may not be sung, but the emphasis and intonation is a kind of music, if a reader can slow down enough to let the words have their way. The line breaks function as a form of notation, even in poems that have lines of only one or two words. Usually.

It’s the music of the spheres. Or just this planet. The line of a poem is a creek winding its way through wood and field, over and around rocks as it charts a path, singing as only water, the native tongue of the earth, can. And you, reader, hearer, are the leaf that is carried along, through new and unexpected and familiar landscapes, on its melody of meaning.

Too damn fun. I have never stopped being a kid (cf. “The Boy”).

Is there an over-arching theme in this collection?

The over-arching theme of this book is not wanting to leave home to write the poems that are in it. The collection began before, but was completed during the plague year.

I lowered my sights a little this time around. Instead of striving for the immortals (you know how it is), I took a deep breath and tried to relax and take a longer look around me; the immediate neighbourhood surroundings, as well as those in my head. Let them enter and linger, to see what might grow—even if this tested the hard-earned serenity.

The results led at times to poems more offbeat, even surreal, than usual. If there is a usual. Like the one about a dog washing his paws at the sink. Others are more down home. The park across the street, and the people who frequent it. More dogs. Squirrels, mystic or mundane. As well as poems that began as light rain, or jazz heard through the trees, or the wild flowers that grow at the side of the road. Death entered too, but there is no avoiding that one; and hurling a three-year-old in the swimming pool up into heaven where he can wave Hi to all who have gone before, before he plunges back down into the water.

Again, too damn fun.

What’s your typical process when putting a collection of poems together (Fast/slow? Regular/sporadic?), and was it different for the poems in this book?

The typical process, if there is one, would be gathering poems that were written over a period of years, and trying to organize them into a coherent order, sceptical that such an order exists. To me, the poems are often so different from each other, and come from such different times and places, they grow sharp elbows when I try to put them in line. Though I’ve learned that to those reading the poems, my (singing) voice runs so strongly through them all that order is not an issue.

I’ve always envied poets who say they are writing a new book, as though they already have a narrative arc, and are proceeding through. My muse would never approve. I’ve also always envied poets and other writers who keep journals. I envy them primarily because of the journal itself, the physical object. I’m a nut for stationery. The tools of the trade. But they’re like the hand-plane that sits in a shop drawer and rarely gets used, for I have never been able to faithfully make entries into any of the empty volumes that grace a section of shelving in my writing room—to which I retire when I do not want to write. My muse doesn’t much approve of the designated room, either.

So I bought a Moleskin on a whim at a bookstore far from home, no surprise—but this time it took. And I decided to trust my intuition. Honestly. After all these years. To trust that if a few words or a stupid line came into my head I should just write them down, uncritically, and let them sit on the notebook page until the next time I looked, when perhaps another few words or lines might suggest themselves. And thus began the process that begat the book, Call Me Home. It sounds like Writing 101. But that’s the thing with this job, this craft and sullen art. You’re always starting over, from scratch. Like you’re a kid and it’s the first time.