I'm from Chicago, so the Chicago working-class poets still mean a great deal to me.

This is the age of fear and so many of us feel afraid to speak out about what has happened to our lives in the wake of 9/11. Television promotes the world as a scary place for the United States and this justifies peeling away every element of privacy we had before. The media is monopolized so we don't even hear a lot of dissent about this new era.

People like to blame Mexican food, but look at what's happening globally, look at all the fast foods and products filled with trans fat. Before the Mexican Revolution, a hundred years ago, people were eating what now macrobiotics tells us to eat, corn, black beans, rice. That's what people were eating - and chile peppers. That's a healthy diet. And also they ate a lot of vegetables.

I like to mix it up, because the kind of comments you can get from a fiction writer about your poetry are going to be very different than what you'll get from a poet.

Even though it's hard to believe, but people who know me really well know I'm shy. I have to go past that fear.

We are told by media - books, television, reality shows - that heartbreak is this terrible thing and yet we should seek it. We're told that heartbreak is all about love and we should just go after that high over and over again. We are told it is healthy to be addicted to this kind of behavior and the highs associated with love. But, that's not all what heartbreak is.

I feel like I am in a box of bees when I am in a room with lots of people and I'm just looking for the door. I find myself getting more and more agoraphobic as time goes on.