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.

Well, we're all going to die, so mortality is a part of writing and life.

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.

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.

Poetry needs to be alive, unabashedly, and, for me, that entails seeing its complexity, the grit and grimness and jubilance and beauty.

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 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.