Does the word “experiment” in the title refer to an affinity for experimentation in poetry?
Experiment is a word that can cut both ways. Because I mistrust it, I wanted to connect it to the actual science of cascade experiments. In terms of experimentation in poetry, I think I’ve always been interested in pushing my work, so my poems change more from book to book than those of some other poets. I try to see what language can do and to keep myself and, I hope, readers, interested. I’m interested in innovation, the new, but not just because it’s new; I try to limit it to things that seem to have depth and to be worth it. Experiments also connote failure, another topic I’m interested in. There’s a poem in the book called “Failure,” and in it I was thinking about the way that failure is a large part of life for everyone, especially for every writer. We have to deny it in order to go on writing, but I wanted to dwell a little bit more on the way things can go wrong. Writers are always walking this tightrope; you don’t know how your work is going to be received—whether it will mean
