I think that there is a lessening of attention. Sometimes when a series is done I still make a few extra pictures where I’m still kind of batting the dead mouse around and sometimes those are where the best pictures get me because I’m not trying as hard, or I’m more open-minded to let other things come into the picture. That’s what happened with one of my favorite pictures in the book, the one where everyone’s in the sand and they’re making out. I actually ended up dating one of the girls in this picture afterwards.

The White Album is a project that we performed in Pittsburgh. We did it at the Wexner in Ohio. We did it at BAM. We’re going to perform it at the Center for the Art of Performance in Los Angeles, which is co-represented by Center Theater Group. And I still don’t feel like the piece is totally finished. I don’t feel like I had nearly enough time to actually develop the work. I feel like I threaded a needle and got it to a certain point that I’m proud of, but I still haven’t had enough time to play with all of the components involved in the work to get them to harmonize in the way that I want.

Usually I’m overcome with sadness and fear, actually. And when I have that feeling where the bottom drops out of things, I know that it’s done.

I don’t think you can finish a poem in the same way I don’t think you can finish a feeling, but I can find a tolerable place to pause. I am a very neurotic self-editor, and in this book in particular, because there’s so much personal vulnerability in it, I felt the need to shave the poems so I could account for almost every move or word or turn or line break. With the more formally experimental poems, I sometimes stumble when I read them, and I think that’s a good thing: I want that stumble; I wanted the poems to be rough and off-kilter. So I worked very hard to shape them into very tight, vibrating forms.