History, with its hard spine & dog-eared Corners, will be replaced with nuance, Just like the dinosaurs gave way To mounds and mounds of ice.

Often it is a moment rather than an event that makes a poem.

I feel like the older I get, the truer it feels that I'm only going have an investment in a poem if it allows or forces me to bring something that's supremely me onto the page. I used to think that the speaker of a poem was talking to someone else, to some ideal reader or listener, but now I think that speakers - poets - are talking to themselves. The poem allows you to pose questions that you have you ask of yourself knowing that they are unanswerable.

Joy is a part of my process. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that poetry, as a practice, necessitates a sense of joy. It's exhilarating to come into contact with the things we write into being. And a real sense of play and abandon – even when we are relying on hard-won technique, and even when the aim is deadly serious. How often do we get the excuse to stop, think, and then stop thinking altogether and try to listen to what sits behind our outside of our thoughts? Poets are lucky.

History, with its hard spine & dog-eared Corners, will be replaced with nuance, Just like the dinosaurs gave way To mounds and mounds of ice.

When I was young, my father was lord Of a small kingdom: a wife, a garden, Kids for whom his word was Word. It took years for my view to harden, To shrink him to human size.

I think tension between the intimate and the vast is at the heart of every poem by any poet, though of course the terms with which it is explored vary. Perhaps it is something we seek out in order to affirm that our small lives are tethered to something large and ongoing.