A book is finished when it does not want me to work on it any longer...it reaches a point when it feels like it is literally avoiding me. I have a very physical relationship with the manuscript, almost a corps à corps. Paradoxically, when I finally feel at ease with a manuscript, with its voices, I realize it is finished. I see a book as a living organism, with its own rules and will. What matters to me is to allow it to grow and to acquire an existence of its own. It’s as if the book uses me in order to come into existence, rather than being written.

I can tell you exactly and this is a really good lesson that I had to learn. The song gets sent in some format or another, and I add to it what I think is mine to add to flesh out what was being sent. At a certain point what I’ve noticed is if I get into this space where I think “Oh and I need to add this and then I need to add that,” which is not really coming from the song, but from my own ego. I don’t mean that in a negative way, but just it’s just coming from me, it’s not the impulse of the music itself, then inevitably it starts sounding terrible to my ears. I’ve lost a couple pieces because of that. My motto is to try to stay very sensitive to when the piece is expressing what it came to express, and that I have augmented to make sure that it can be understood, but that I haven’t taken it off some place that it had no intention of going.

That’s a really good question. I don’t think you ever know; you just have to make a call. Finishing is acknowledging that there’s no further progress to be made at the current juncture. If you sit on a song for 20 years and come back to it with all the wisdom of your life, you could probably write a better song, but objectively, you have to get it out into the world in order to continue to live as an artist. So, there’s a sense of: “well, this is as good as it’s gonna get for me at my level right now.” Sometimes you realize that early, but it can take a long time. I think deadlines were invented by God to make art possible. I don’t think I could finish anything without a deadline, self-imposed or external. With the book, it was just: these people at Penguin, they don’t know me. They have no idea that I can’t do this. I have to do it because otherwise they’ll know that I can’t do it.

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.