I approach poetry as a control system, one whose function is to contain packets of experience or experienceable units that are expressed through act of reading. My objective when writing a poem is to achieve a kind of stability for its various threads of sound and meaning by deliberately framing them within a hard set of constrictions or measures. The measures can be arbitrary, metrical, personal, historical, visual—anything that begins to set limits on the language, and creates a pathway through which the words can move.

Jonathan Thirkield