I'm all over my poems, even if their relation to my everyday life is that of dream to reality.

I write poems from dreams pretty frequently. It's limiting to think the poem has to come from a sensical lyric "I" stating things clearly or dramatically. This whole course is trying to say there are millions of ways to approach writing a poem.

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.

I think of poetry as a very inclusive term. Still, it's interesting that people want to make the distinction. I love the magazine Double Room for that reason (contributors have to write about their ideas on the prose poem/flash fiction).

We humans have an amazing way of making everything personal.

Poems tend to have instructions for how to read them embedded in their language.

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