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.

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

I think that the people who really accomplish things in this world have to have a little bit of crazy in them.

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

I write when I can. I have no set writing practices, or times, or methods. I write when I'm not doing other things - in the odd times when I'm traveling, or in hotels, or when I get time to be alone with my thoughts.

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.

Young poets worry that their experiences - whether urban or rural, immigrant or native, small town, suburb, or big city - aren't worthy of the written word. But for me the urge toward poetry, that seductive feeling of being swept away by words, was enough for me to overcome that fear that my experiences weren't worthy of poetry itself.