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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.