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.

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.

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 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.

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.