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

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

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

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

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

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.