What I like about prose poems is that they seem to make people uncomfortable - people want to define them, justify them, attack them. Prose poems are natural fence-sitters.

I don't think all poems need to be written in conversational language - those are often great poems but there should also be poems of incoherent bewilderment and muddled mystery.

Poems can't help but be personal. Mine are certainly an accurate blueprint of the things I think about, if not a record of my daily life.

Teaching is a great way to keep learning.

I don't like basements, but definitely basements could be poems. Not fond of skin diseases, but again, there's a pattern. Probably anything could be a poem.

As a reader I don't distinguish between confessional and non-confessional work. After all, how do we even know that certain "I" poems are confessional? It's a tricky business, this correlating of the speaker and the poet.

Not everyone is going to like every carnival ride.