I never think of my audience when I write a poem. I try to write out of whatever is haunting me; in order for a poem to feel authentic, I have to feel I'm treading on very dangerous ground, which can mean that the resulting revelations may prove hurtful to other people. The time for thinking about that kind of guilt or any collective sense of responsibility, however, occurs much later in the creative process, after the poem is finished.

I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.

To practice your scales, so to speak, in order play the symphony, is what you have to do as a young poet.

I loved to write when I was a child. I wrote, but I always thought it was something that you did as a child, then you put away childish things.

It's unfortunate that sometimes in schools, there's this need to have things quantified and graded.

My best times are midnight to six actually. I'll leaf through my notebooks and if something catches my eye and I feel like I want to transfer it from the notebook to the page, I do, and then comes this very strange process which is difficult to describe in that I'll write until I get stuck or I can't go any further or I'm boring myself or whatever and then I might go to another poem.

We should always do something that makes us feel like a child again. Keep learning, no matter what it is.