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I was on the football team because I wanted to experience the different iconic social classes of high school. So football for me was an attempt to socially integrate in an interesting way. And then I didn't like it anymore and stopped doing it and focused more on drama and science and other forms of art and music.

The more I read my poems, the more I find out about them. I still read them with the same passion I felt when I wrote them as a young man.

I'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that.

I think poetry was always where I went to deal with my deepest feelings.

Football was a wonderful experience for me. It was a means of, oh, I don't know, sustaining for much of my youth. In times of trouble, I've always had football. I always knew I was a football player. And that was a comfort on many occasions.

We all know that the great memories of our childhood are the little triumphs - it doesn't really matter whether that was in writing, art, on the hockey field or on the football field. It's something that makes you feel - 'I can do this stuff.'

I was obsessed with football when I was growing up.

For a kid who's lost his mom and all the rage and grief that no one was able to talk out of me, football was a very therapeutic sport. Very.

I was really drawn to spoken-word style poetry. I loved the rhythms, and for some reason, I was just drawn to this poetry as a way of expressing my feelings, because I didn't have any other outlet.

The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.