Cheerful, sensitive, sassy.

Alchemy. Love. Resilience.

Unimpeachable, nonpareil, self‑effacing.

Independent, curious and funny.

Well, that’s the optimistic reading of it, which you are never able to apply when it happens. You can read it this way when it’s over. Rationally speaking, it’s a period that’s needed, because the danger for every poet, I think, is to write too much. So these are the blessed moments of silence, protecting you from writing too many poems, diluting you and what you have to say in a stream of banal poems. It’s necessary, but still very painful, because I just don’t know what to do if I don’t write poems. I still survive, but it is painful.

Poetry is more important to me, and if I was forced to choose, it’d be poetry. I often write essays when I’m unable to write a poem, but I also enjoy writing essays, so I don’t suffer while writing them.

This is a French expression, silence radio, which is used in the navy, for example—when you cannot use the radio because the enemy is near. It’s not an expression I use regularly; I used it once, maybe, to describe my period of inner silence, which mostly happens when I’m back home, coming from Houston. The long weeks or months of silence. So it’s the opposite of inspiration; it’s the time of doing other things. Waiting.

Yes, because I worship the summer, which doesn’t exactly encourage me to work, but I tell myself that life isn’t all about working. For me, summer is a time to enjoy the world, and I want to see as much of it as possible.

The good part of aging is that you read more and more. You discover poets you never heard of when you were younger.

Yes, because it seems to me that poetry cannot be hermetically closed to thinking. And thinking always enters the field of contradiction. So it also has to do with the way I try to reconcile poetry versus thinking. … I think you’re right that for many American poets, poetry is almost an escape from the cruelty of thinking, from the choices you make when you think. Escaping your life—which may be tragic, but it’s not problematic. So I see it differently, as a necessity to confront these categories.