Your book is arranged so that poem titles proceed in alphabetical order. Did you have any particular models in mind? Did you find this structure confining in any way, or was it a way into additional poems?

When I first began working on the poems that now make up Flying Blind, I kept them in alphabetical order by title to make it easy to keep track of them. At some point I realized that it made much deeper sense for this book, that reciting the alphabet is one of our earliest experiences of the magic of language, and the phonetic alphabet is what makes it possible for us to see what we hear, what makes the invisible visible. After that, the order did indeed suggest other poems: several begin with the prefix be-, for example, or with dis-. But I didn't feel obligated to include a poem for every letter of the alphabet, that wasn't the point.

You begin the book with "Abracadabra," a magical, incantatory word and the title of a poem in which another word — hope — prolongs a man's life. The poem seems to want to restore to language an ancient power that much current thinking would deny. Could you talk about what Flying Blind has taught you about the relation between language and experience?

As a philosophy major in college, I studied ordinary language philosophy. As a graduate student in anthropology, I concentrated on linguistics, all the time hoping to get at the relationship between language and what we call "reality." Probably the most compelling writers on the topic for me are Ludwig Wittgenstein in philosophy and Benjamin Whorf and Edward Sapir in anthropology. Whorf's sense of the primacy of language meshes with my own and has been a shaping force in my thinking and writing ever since I read him. His studies of Hopi and other languages and cultures led him to believe that language determines what we see, that a given language shapes its user's reality. He argued that no two languages divide the world into identical categories. He didn't argue for a strict determinism, as some recent critics have argued. His point was simply that language shapes reality as much or more than it is shaped by reality. What this means to me is that language is not some second-class citizen, forever doomed to fail in its attempts to capture reality, but instead a response, a tandem reality, a duet.

After I finished my second book, Objects of Affection, I wanted to reconsider what assumptions I was writing out of. I was reading a good deal of literary theory, and I realized that the poems I had been writing didn't reflect my own beliefs about the relationship between language and reality. That became the project of the poems in Flying Blind.

Your poems make their astute observations from a unique point-of-view, which is neither the first-person "I" so popular in contemporary poetry nor the disembodied "eye" with pretenses to omniscience and objectivity.

When I first began to read contemporary poetry, I was struck by three conventions I disliked: heavy reliance on the first-person singular, I, a similar use of you, and a confinement to present tense, all of which seemed narrow and limited. At the same time that I found first-person singular a simplistic and self-absorbed strategy in many of the poems I was reading, one I thought of as somehow lazy or insufficiently demanding, I found it virtually impossible to write poems of my own in first-person singular. When I tried, the poems were self-conscious and stiff, and I usually had to move them into third-person she, or sometimes you (which I've never much liked) or first-person plural, we, or use an apparently omniscient narrator. I kept trying first person, but I was never very happy with the results.

Then Marvin Bell published two books of poems, Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See and These Green-Going-to-Yellow, and I saw just how fluid and supple and moving first-person singular could be. Here was a voice that seemed to have great range and subtlety and was direct and clear but far from simple. Finding/constructing a similar first-person voice became the project of my second book, Objects of Affection. I even wrote a sort of exorcism poem, "Declining We," in which I swore off the plural. I thought once I had found that voice, I would want to keep writing in it forever.

But, in fact, as soon as I finished those poems, I knew I wanted to do something else, and that's when I began the reading and rethinking that led to the poems in Flying Blind. These poems feel more whole and less fragmentary, in terms of what they draw on, than any I've written before.

Where are you in these poems? In other words, how would you describe your presence in these poems?

Offstage, I hope. Behind the scenes. Out of their way, letting the poems speak for themselves, letting language speak for itself. I just happen to be the medium it speaks through, on lucky nights when I'm listening hard.