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?

Editing is work, and it's hard to do while working on one's own writing.

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 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.

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

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?