If you are my friend and say to me, "Please don't write about this," I won't.

After my marriage ended, I had an urge to skip that part of my life completely in terms of poetry, not publish anything at all about it.

The spoken word community was significant in making me want to write accessible and urgent poems. Bob Holman, in particular, was an impressive figure.

My advice to my younger self would have been, "Chill. Concentrate on the poems. Everything else will work itself out."

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.

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.

Though it does seem like I have written an immense amount of work, over the years I have pushed the pause button. I have poems that I haven't sent out for publication, mostly based on political/social issues.