I believe it's impossible to write good poetry without reading. Reading poetry goes straight to my psyche and makes me want to write. I meet the muse in the poems of others and invite her to my poems. I see over and over again, in different ways, what is possible, how the perimeters of poetry are expanding and making way for new forms.

Over the years, I became more and more interested in the forms and techniques in which things could be said.

While poetry was less professionalized than it is now, I still had this urge to win prizes and see my work in magazines, to get an "A," as though poetry could be graded. I wish I had been more patient and less frantic about getting published.

I believe it's impossible to write good poetry without reading. Reading poetry goes straight to my psyche and makes me want to write. I meet the muse in the poems of others and invite her to my poems. I see over and over again, in different ways, what is possible, how the perimeters of poetry are expanding and making way for new forms.

Writing is performative - and while, yes, the words in essence will be there "forever," poems are often about ecstatic moments rather than trying to pin down a particular truth of an event.

I always wanted to be some kind of writer - I wrote plays and songs and "books" before I realized living and breathing people still wrote poems.

In addition to writing in received forms, I have also had fun making up forms - Möbius strips and visual poems, particularly.