“Well, I figured, a plumber is a plumber. You don’t have to be a great plumber to call yourself a plumber, if you are a plumber each day. But what the word poet meant to me when I was a kid, those faces in the little portholes of the Oscar Williams anthology that I carried around with me—those creatures, those beings, were so special, they are so special, they are kind of like angels in some way, whose power of speech extended over time, who were helping us long after they had gone, and delighting us. So I didn’t feel comfortable using that word for myself. But then I figured, that’s what I do, that’s what I do, so that’s what I’m going to call myself.”

“I have always written about my father. His death occurred just before I began to study for my MFA at Maryland. It seems I am always writing poems about my father. They have changed over the years. The initial poems dealt with the grief, the loss, the contradictions, the pain, the rubble of a family. I like this poem because it seems to find a sense of joy and acceptance that does not rise above tragedy or the challenges; but instead co-exists with them. I can’t count that sentiment in the poem as a poetic achievement, as much as a strange thing rising up out of the mist of getting older. I am thankful to see that relationship in the chain of my family’s evolution from a different perspective.”

“I found the piece elicits the melancholy of the collage and imbues it with an emotional narrative drawn from the scant clues provided by the work. The poem becomes an armature which contextualizes the anthropomorphic imagery and strikes the discordant tone that the work portrays.”

“For the longest time, I thought that poetry was a way of finding answers. It was, in the sense that I learned a lot about myself by writing it, but that was actually a fringe benefit. The big benefit was that I learned it was the questions I was after, not the answers. It’s much harder to come up with a question than to give an answer. Alas, realizing that has made me have to work harder.”

“Sometimes poetry writes itself. This week, a dying female anglerfish rose from the depths of the ocean, where no light reaches, up to the sunny waters off the coast of the Canary Islands. To me, it’s a fascinating creature that attracts prey with its own bioluminescent ‘lure.’ It is also hideous. This may be the only time a living anglerfish has been witnessed so close to the surface.”

“I was thinking about my cousin when I wrote this poem, as I often do when I am writing. I want people to know about him, his kindness, his carefulness, and how loved he was by everyone in our family. Today is the five-year anniversary of his last day alive. All I can really say is that nothing has been the same since his death. We were all changed by it. When I’m teaching, I’m reminded how many of my students have also been changed by the sudden death of a family member. I think about my cousin a lot when I teach. My students are finding out much younger than I did what grief feels like, and I’m learning through reading their writing that, despite how unique it feels, my family is not alone. My cousin feels present each time my grief connects me to other people.”