Being deeply aware of fragility and ecstasy seems to me an essential part of being alive and living fully - and there's no way for me to separate this from my poems.

Poetry does need a bit of ferocity. The only way to attend to the fractured world is to write a ferocious kind of music, to sing that volatility.

Being deeply aware of fragility and ecstasy seems to me an essential part of being alive and living fully - and there's no way for me to separate this from my poems.

I've never thought of my poems as violent. Violence, to me, has so much negativity attached to it - maybe that's my trouble with the word. But ferocious - indeed, I'll take it. And yes, poetry does need a bit of ferocity. Poetry needs to be alive, unabashedly, and, for me, that entails seeing its complexity - the grit and grimness and jubilance and beauty.

I found it incredibly challenging to write clear prose that had the dynamism that I wanted.

I think of my best poems as vessels that I can or hope to fill with everything I have. I try to give to them all of the electric complexity. Each one fails at this, of course, but I keep trying - adoring each of them, loving the process, the ebb and flow of it - and each time, the failures fail a bit better.

The world comes to us in fragments and shards. Whatever stories we shape from our days, we're always dealing with gaps, blank-spots, and blackouts - and in handling all these breakages, we are, at all times, so incredibly intimate with sharp edges, the unending knife-like moments of failure and joy in our lives.