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

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

There's this pet phrase about writing that is bandied around particularly in workshops about "finding your own voice as a poet", which I suppose means that you come out from under the direct influence of other poets and have perhaps found a way to combine those influences so that it appears to be your own voice.

Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.

But tonight, the lion of contentment has placed a warm heavy paw on my chest.

Write the poem only you can write.

As soon as I start to write I'm very aware, I'm trying to be aware that a reader just might well pick up this poem, a stranger. So when I'm writing - and I think that this is important for all writers - I'm trying to be a writer and a reader back and forth. I write two lines or three lines. I will immediately stop and turn into a reader instead of a writer, and I'll read those lines as if I had never seen them before and as if I had never written them.