I'm particularly interested in narrated meditations, where an event meets a psyche that wishes to make sense of it, revel in it, and/or argue with it—so that a tension may yield some important insight, an insight that isn't stated baldly, necessarily, but revealed through image, scene, action, and emotion.

Often I'm attracted to the difficult or uncomfortable moments in a life, and in the culture, that manifest on a human scale, such as where sex, politics (and sexual politics), race, work, religion, etc., engage and collide with the psyche's vocabulary of loss, love, fear, honesty, and humor . . . all in defense of, and as anthem to, the emotional life.

Using a self that is sometimes called "I," I write in straightforward language. Since, as I see it, my subjects engage with difficulty, I want my language to be clear—with leaps of word, image or syntax from time to time so that my poems are not too bare and stripped down.

I'm attracted to the essayistic more than the lyric—argument, analysis, interpretation—more than pure song, though rhythm, cadence, sound, and the lyric's way of accessing emotion are very important to me.