On Poetry:

If poetry is an incarnation of emotional honesty, how do you poetry when you’re fundamentally dishonest? False words flop flimsy off the page. There’s no room for deception or narrative malarkey like in the labyrinth of fiction, nowhere for denial or obfuscation to hide behind the skinny bars of stanzas. To write a poem you have to commit. to bare your soul. To undress your ego, and then strip down further until your very marrow is naked. You can’t hide from its agency: it will find you, grab you by the arm, and beat raw emotion and abstract thought out of you. You will know yourself. You will confront the lies you’ve told yourself, feelings squashed under an impermeable mountain of nonchalance and drowned in the quagmire of proverbial male apathy. And then you will hobble to put your pen to paper, enlightened, exhausted, open, and spill your emotional guts, honest abscesses your ink.