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

I'm pretty lenient with myself about time - if I feel like taking photographs of small things inside ice cubes or making animal collages, I just do it. When I want to write, I write. It's all part of the same thing for me.

In my own writing, I've mostly abandoned end-rhyme, but wordplay is still a huge part of my process.

Having my poems set to music by Eric Moe has completely knocked my socks off.

When I have my students do erasures, I'm always amazed by the way their voice comes through, whether they're doing an erasure of a romance novel or an encyclopedia. Your sensibility will out.

I don't think that you can say by any stretch of the imagination that all Wisconsin or Brooklyn-based poets write in a particular way. Similar sensibilities can spring up next to each other in the flower bed, or across oceans.

I would love to collaborate on a graphic novel with an artist - I'm terrible at drawing but I really love that genre.