My personal opinion is that if someone writes honestly about war, it will inherently be anti-war.

There's something immediate about the experience of reading a poem - whether it's the music or some other element of it - that just seems to access another part of the brain. You know, Charles Olson talks about this transfer of energy that happens between the writer and the reader of the poem. I guess there's something essential to me about acknowledging upfront the immensity of it - the difficulty of it - and even allowing that to be the subject.

One of the things my service in Iraq did give me was this freedom from fear of failure or any kind of expectations that I had to take a standard path.

I wanted something that I could look back on and say, yes, you were fighting too, you burned to be alive, and whatever failure or accident of nature caused you to be killed could be explained by something other than the fact that I'd missed your giving up.

I guess I find the boundaries between poetry and prose to be somewhat permeable.

The war tried to kill us in the spring. As grass greened the plains of Nineveh and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer.

I know that the writers I read and admire all have an influence on my work, but trying to determine to what degree any particular piece of input changes the way I think about writing seems counterproductive.