THC: How do you come up with ideas for poems?

EO: Often, lately it’s been that I come up with a line I like while I’m walking and I like the sound of it and I’ll write it down and the poem eventually comes from that. I don’t think of a subject first, it’s initially the line that gets me interested.

THC: How personal are the poems?

EO: They’re mostly about observing the world, not about personal life. Obviously they are some expression of what is important to me at the time, but not in a narrative way.

THC: What are the forms of your poems? Do they have meter and rhyme?

EO: I write poems with attention to what sounds good. Sometimes this means that they will have meter or rhyme. Right now I’ve been writing poems using syllabics where each stanza has a pattern of numbers of syllables in each lines—a haiku is a type of syllabic poem. Marianne Moore uses this form a lot in her early poetry. She’s known for precision, she’s interested in classification of things.

THC: Do you try to imitate her work?

EO: Marianne Moore has an authoritative and clear voice. I don’t try to imitate her. I try not to imitate any voice, I’m most comfortable using a colloquial voice.

THC: Who are your influences?

EO: The work of A.R. Ammons is a major influence on my poetry. Ammons’ rural upbringing was at the heart of his poetry throughout his life, though he did not live in his home state of North Carolina as an adult. I identify very much with this indebtedness to a place in which one cannot live. Robert Frost, another poet much indebted to one American region, is also very important to me at the moment.