I move back and forth. The Tribe book is easier. I have a proposal and a plan for that, so it’s easier to know when that’s done because there’s a hard end. There’s a certain amount of chapters, and that whole thing. But poetry books, at least in my experience, those tell you when they’re done. My first book told me when it was done. It told me when I had mined everything I could out of the emotional landscape I was trying to create, and it pointed me to an exit strategy. With poetry books, I have been lucky to have my poems do that. My poems tell me how they want to live in the world, when they want to live in the world, and when they’re done being played with… Sometimes, it’s over the course of a month with one poem, or sometimes it takes a little longer than that. I think the hard work is knowing when to pull yourself back so you don’t overextend or let your projects blend together.

If I’m starting from one place, I’m trying to see how far away from that place I can get on an emotional level. For example, the protagonist of Loot develops an obsession early on, so I sensed that the arc of the novel would end with a release from that obsession, in one way or another—disappointment, disillusionment, or a different kind of liberation.

I mean, nothing’s ever done. I don’t think anyone knows when something is really done. There’s just doing it and not doing it. You do it until you don’t want to do it anymore. Then hopefully, someone else will take it over and keep on doing it. Songs are not really from any individual. There are all these lawsuits about plagiarism, Led Zeppelin has been going through that lately. It bums me out. The idea of intellectual property is kind of a trap. It’s just a way to get by, which I guess is fair because most of us are broke.

When I look at a piece and I feel like it’s done. Usually I feel like everything is sitting where it should be, and nothing’s out of place. If I turn my back to the work and turn back quickly, nothing stands out as wrong. All the different elements seem content where they are. Nothing is too off and nothing is too perfectly placed. Everything has to be where it should be.