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.

Each poem seems to demand its own formal approach. In both drafting and revision, I'll play around with line lengths and stanza formations, eventually letting the poem settle into what I think is its own best form.

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

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 like when a poem ends on its "receipts," meaning it gives me something tactile or tangible to dwell on as I exit the reading experience. So I strive to end my own poems that way as well.

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

I do bring my teaching together with my writing. I make students write in class, and do the same prompts I give them. I'm always on the lookout for teaching poems - poems that inspire me and my students to write poems in response.