Teaching is a great way to keep learning.

Usually form seems to find me in the process of writing a poem, though I have nothing against starting out with the form.

Poetic success is when you write a poem that makes you excited and bewildered and aglow.

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 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.

"Confessional poetry" is another one of those labels. It goes in and out of fashion.

I have a vague memory of seeing an image of a child in an iron lung and the phrase "sad little breathing machine" coming into my head. The more I thought about it, the more I felt that on certain days - the worse ones - we could all be described as sad little breathing machines.