From an interview with Mary Jo Bang at Katonah Poetry:

For me, every poem is about consciousness. Primarily mine, but also consciousness as I understand it from what I’ve read and from what I’ve seen in a lifetime of observing others. What the reader is being offered when they read a poem written by me is the movie of my mind, but in flux. The film has to be in flux because the mind is not only multi-layered but also dynamic. If you limit yourself to language to represent a fluid mind—then, of course, the representation will be inexact, abbreviated, and it might sometimes seem chaotic, or at the very least acrobatic. 

In order to better represent “what I mean,” in the poem, I try to exploit the sounds inherent in language, as well as the fused layers of meaning that accompany sound (sonically, for instance, tail evokes tale if you put it near the word “fairy”). But no matter what I do with language, I can’t open the cabinet door and allow the reader to see everything that is in that overstuffed Fibber McGee-ish closet that is my mind. That’s the problem, isn’t it? No one can completely know the mind of another.