I do love the prose poem because it's such a perverse and provocative little box - always asking to be questioned, never giving a straight or definitive answer.

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

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.

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

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.

People "confess" can be wildly different. I might go into the confessional and say, "Father, what is my obsession with miniatures?"

As a reader I don't distinguish between confessional and non-confessional work. After all, how do we even know that certain "I" poems are confessional? It's a tricky business, this correlating of the speaker and the poet.