Public work does not cut into personal creativity. They are streams from the same river but with different destinations.

As we all know, poets are born brain-wired a certain way and every poet I know wrote as a child. I'm no exception.

I write a book of poems and then the characters won't go away so I write a play from that.

I am a product of the "Hippie" theater movement of the '60s.

If anything, hearing another poet is a sacred experience I enter, but I can honestly say this does not influence my own work.

I get a huge energy transfusion from listening to poets read their works.

I started writing poetry because language was how I understood the world. It was a paradigm that made everything matter and in forms that were safe to hold what I felt.