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.

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?

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.

When poets die, other poets take it personally, almost as an affront. A lot of us "left behind" are thinking that poetry is the one thing keeping us alive and present, so what does it mean when one of our ranks chooses to end his or her life? There's an anger beneath the grief, you know? That anger and grief, in turn, breeds other poems from those of us left behind.

I write a lot, and then forget what I've written, and then come back to it and say, "Not bad, I should do something with this!"

I find it hard to write poems in reaction to world/national events unless there's a way in that's so evident to me that I can't deny the urge to write about such events. It takes me a while to gather the evidence, you know?