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.

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

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

Only after my father's death could I speak my own individual truths about him. In a sense, I had to turn him into a character, a figure I could control through language.

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

I switch between fixed forms and free verse often, and enjoy being a poet who can "swing both ways," so to speak.

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.