In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.

While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.

The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' That's the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.

But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her, barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor. She will look in at me with her thin arms extended, offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.

High School is the place where poetry goes to die.

I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word accessible.

…balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.