In my own writing, I've mostly abandoned end-rhyme, but wordplay is still a huge part of my process..

I don't see much difference between prose poems and flash fiction (I've often taught the latter as the former), but then I also don't see that much d….

Writing a poem is always a process of subtracting: you start with all of language available to you, and you choose a smaller field..

Poetic success is when you write a poem that makes you excited and bewildered and aglow..

Encountering rhyme out of the blue is like finding a long-lost twin (fraternal), or a suitcase that closes with a particularly satisfying click..

It's really thrilling to work with an illustrator - your vision expands with the addition of someone else's artwork/artistic vision..

I do love the prose poem because it's such a perverse and provocative little box - always asking to be questioned, never giving a straight or definit….

When I have my students do erasures, I'm always amazed by the way their voice comes through, whether they're doing an erasure of a romance novel or a….

Poems can't help but be personal. Mine are certainly an accurate blueprint of the things I think about, if not a record of my daily life..

Recently, while I was in England, I saw a documentary on the BBC about the border between India and Pakistan at Wagah. When the border closes each ev….

Erasures are interesting to me because they prove what particular sieves we all are..

I have a vague memory of seeing an image of a child in an iron lung and the phrase "sad little breathing machine" coming into my head. The more I tho….

I'm interested in concrete poems - anything that complicates the line between the written and the visual..

Not everyone is going to like every carnival ride..

Teaching is a great way to keep learning..

Usually form seems to find me in the process of writing a poem, though I have nothing against starting out with the form..

I don't think all poems need to be written in conversational language - those are often great poems but there should also be poems of incoherent bewi….

Whether you're talking about political borders or aesthetic divisions (and clearly, the political ones have much more tragic consequences), it seems ….

Poems tend to have instructions for how to read them embedded in their language..

We humans have an amazing way of making everything personal..

I guess I'm a bit of a projector - my emotions tend to get translated into different, fanciful situations..