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.

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

When I get interested in a new topic I teach a class on it. There's a graduate seminar I teach in which the students and I try to expand the terminology we use to talk about poetry as well as expand our notion of what makes a poem - we read source texts on architecture, dance, photography, film and the graphic novel.

One of my favorite titles of an art piece is "Première Communion de Jeunes Filles Chlorotiques Par Un Temps De Neige" or "First Communion of Chlorotic Young Girls in Snowy Weather" by Alphonse Allais. It's essentially a joke of a title, since the accompanying image is a simple white square.

Writing directly from a feeling of anger or sadness is difficult, but if you distract part of your brain with word games, the ignored emotion often tiptoes in.

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

I suppose it's useful in designating writing that tends to come from personal experience, work that delineates an "I," but it's a loose lasso, one which may rope certain poems by one poet and not others.