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.

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.

I feel like I give myself all day long to other people and other things, and I still seem like I have something to write once in awhile. Not often, though.

I was sort of obsessed about corporate people committing suicide.

I think being a poet, period, is isolating.

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.

I just didn't want any order in anything. I have to leave an ordered life for them - the kids - and my job. I have to be at my desk at a certain time, and I have to answer e-mails within a certain time period.