Sometimes people ask me to do stuff in New York, like "Can you read at this thing?" And I say, "Nooo, I can't just get on a plane with these two screaming children - I can't just get rid of them on such short notice and take vacation and fly over to New York."

I think being a poet, period, is isolating.

Whether people like your work or not, but it's also based on a lot of other things - geography, who you happen to connect with and where they sit in that ladder - and all of that felt really isolating and disheartening to me when I figured it out.

There's an attraction to emotional clusters or hypocrisies or awkwardness. A desire to expose something or point at something that's already poking out.

Sometimes people ask me to do stuff in New York, like "Can you read at this thing?" And I say, "Nooo, I can't just get on a plane with these two screaming children - I can't just get rid of them on such short notice and take vacation and fly over to New York."

The whole process of getting a book published is just part of the process. The last of the process that I enjo

I've always felt alone and isolated, and living on the West Coast, there's no poetry community out here, and if there is, it's really spread out - because it's LA, it's spread out.