Morin: Picasso once said, "Every human being is a colony." I find the idea of a polyphonic imagination interesting. Do you see yourself as having a multi-voiced imagination? Do you hear voices first and then later find the characters that serve as vessels for the voices in your poems?

Ai: Well, with the characters based on historical figures, I've usually read something that makes me think this would be an interesting character to write about. After my first book, I realized I often had the last line first. For some reason that has totally disappeared. I don't really think about that anymore but I made it one of my goals to always have a strong ending. In my first book, a lot of those last lines I wrote and worked at first, but now I don't. Usually it's a character and not anything else; an interesting character and it's usually not an idea. I can work with an idea if I get a character, but only if I have a character. If I have an interesting idea I want to work with, I must create a character to complete that idea.