It's really thrilling to work with an illustrator - your vision expands with the addition of someone else's artwork/artistic vision.

I guess I'm a bit of a projector - my emotions tend to get translated into different, fanciful situations.

Writing a poem is always a process of subtracting: you start with all of language available to you, and you choose a smaller field.

If I begin a poem, "I am a donkey," reason kicks in and says, "She is taking on the persona of a donkey." But if I write, "I have taken so many drugs I can't see my feet," the tendency is to take that as a confession on the part of the poet. Maybe that doesn't matter. I'd almost prefer for it to be the other way round.

Erasures are interesting to me because they prove what particular sieves we all are.

Encountering rhyme out of the blue is like finding a long-lost twin (fraternal), or a suitcase that closes with a particularly satisfying click.

Read widely (in and outside of your own genre), keep a notebook with you at all times. Do something that scares you every now and then. Try to locate your own frequency, knowing that one year your voice is on AM 532 and the next it's on FM 92.8.