Writing essays and teaching composition have helped me immensely in writing poetry, because they've forced me to focus on the structure of ideas.

After the first few readings in comedy venues I did begin to write for laughs. There's something so gratifying about stimulating laughter.

The brands with which we surround ourselves prop us up, make us feel sexy and beautiful, when in reality we're pretty dumpy creatures.

We just watch anything speed by. To stop and really ponder what a product label says, or the tagline on a TV commercial, might be inherently silly. Those are things that are almost designed to be thrown away.

Poetry is a way for me to explore a tingly feeling, to let it play itself out, and also to map it. I feel like I'm making little star maps when I write poems.

I want to leave my readers with a sequence of ideas/phrases that makes them question something they'd taken for granted. Or that confuses them to the point that they laugh, but contains one or two phrases/lines that stick in their minds.

Humor and absurdism are inevitable. If you look at our current massive flow of consumer products and digital communication and related media from a sort of astute perspective and carefully state what you see you can't help but sounding like you're joking.