The more prose I wrote, the more the pendulum swung back toward the middle, merging some poetic sensibilities with the more fundamental elements of creative prose.

I think of my best poems as vessels that I can or hope to fill with everything I have.

I see the relationship sincerity/humor differently. Instead of seeing a balance between them, I see them more inextricably linked, as if one is the hard candy shell that gives to the other, or one is the apparition, the ghost-image that invokes the other.

My poems and prose are not often in direct conversation with each other, but there's so much crossover - everything that comes out of that crucible of language - that working in poetry and prose is energizing - to me as a writer and to the work itself.

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.

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.