I lived a life I knew I had to hide My father's edicts resolutely grim.

Part of elegy is confrontation - not just with the idea of death, but with the person who has died.

I need sometimes to hang back in the shadows with my pen and paper, and then other times, I need to take center stage in my own creations. The trick is to know when to hang back, and when to step forward. It's a perpetual ongoing balance.

Social media is alluring, tempting, frustrating, etc. We mistake our interactions in social media as community, but is community possible when you don't even know what someone looks like or what his or her voice sounds like? I've enjoyed connecting with a lot of poets through social media, but do I truly know them if I haven't even met them yet?

Poetry is such an ancient art, and I consider myself young within that art.

I write to be recorder, observer, participant, and sometimes, even judge. I want to engage the world as I see it with my whole self - all of those different aspects of it.

I'm educating myself more about world poetry. I know a lot about contemporary American poetry, so I felt I needed to learn more about figures like Borges, Akhmatova, Neruda, etc. I felt I needed a bigger lens to see poetry through. It really helps to see poetry as a world language, and not just something American.