If trees could speak they wouldn't

I think what life experience has brought to my poems is compassion. When you work hard to make a living, raise a child up into the world, fail at marriage and try again, teach and fail, travel and fall, become ill, well again, weak but grateful, you learn patience, forbearance.

I would say my life experiences are my poetry, whether I'm writing about those actual, factual experiences or not.

When you have worked with people all day who have so little and struggle to make it stretch, who live outside the rarefied, you are humbled.

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.

I try to avoid calling myself a poet because I think that's something someone else has to call you. It's like bragging.

I write to invite the voices in, to watch the angel wrestle, to feel the devil gather on its haunches and rise. I write to hear myself breathing. I write to be doing something while I wait to be called to my appointment with death. I write to be done writing. I write because writing is fun.