It's fun to see someone grow as a writer, moving from their first workshopped poems to publishing their earliest poems to having a book accepted for publication. It's great to see poets with persistence succeed.

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

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.

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

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.

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.