A poem is a corporeal thing. When you create in any art form there’s always going to be some element of the organic. And anything organic hits the limits of animality. A poem is full of meat. It can’t ever escape that, and I think that’s beautiful, though it’s also terrifying to be trapped in a meat sack. In forms of media that are less language-based, like sculpture or painting, there’s a physical reality to them—the canvas, the wood the canvas is stretched on, the paint itself—but people tend to forget the materiality of language or to think that language is above all that. I don’t think it is. To respect poems is to respect them as living, and more living than us. They’re a relic of the organic, always.