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What I wrote all the time when I was a kid - I don't want to call it 'poetry,' because it wasn't poetry. I was not that kind of a writer. I was a rhymer. I was a fan of Dorothy Parker's, so maybe I wrote poetry to that extent, but my main focus was the humor of it, and word construction, and the slant. Your words, it's a very powerful experience.

In the late 60s and early 70s, I did get interested in voices, and in narration and embodying the voice, making the poem sound like a real person talking.

I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.

I've always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.

I loved words. I love to sing them and speak them and even now, I must admit, I have fallen into the joy of writing them.

I've always been drawn to all sorts of genres and all sorts of voices.

I think I felt at some point that I couldn't understand poetry or that it was beyond me or it didn't speak to my experience. I think that was because I hadn't yet found the right poems to invite me in.

I made myself into a poet because it was the first thing I really loved. It was an act of will.

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.

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.