A significant part of your work consists of keen contributions to children’s literature. How can poetry and its metaphoric density work towards not ostracizing children? Is there really a so-called “children’s literature” after all?

More of childhood is poetry than adulthood will ever be. For children, the land of metaphor is still very close, very rich and available. Too much analysis of the dry kind ostracized generations of readers. No one listens to a jazz concert and goes out into the parking lot to analyze it. We bask. More basking in poetry has always been needed. The world of “children’s literature” and yes, I do think there is one, but adults are also invited, is one of the best worlds going. My son, age 23, and I just read Allan Ahlberg’s My Brother’s Ghost and adored it. But, I might also read it to the 5 year old down the block and feel right at home.

Empathy and accessibility are two of the most appealing facets of your work. How do you finetune your poignant naturalness in writing?

Years of practice. Thanks for saying that. I don’t know. I am a simpleton in many ways and always was, and that helps.

Do you believe in a woman’s voice coloring a poem (or any other form of literature)? Has the role of women writers truly evolved in contemporary American poetry?

No, I really don’t. I’m more interested in how we all contain everything. Surely the role has evolved. There are more of us, we are everywhere, and we know it! Everyone knows it!

Many writers conceive their ideas in terms of one or the other genre. You write both fiction and poetry. In your experience, how does the creative process and energy differ?

They are entirely different animals but they bend to dine in the same field. And it’s an instinctive impulse, which gets written at which moment. I have very rarely switched from one to the other with a particular text. The energies, when writing longer prose works, require more focus for longer periods of time — difficult for us short-form addicts. A short-short doesn’t require a different focus. But a long and deliberate crafting of a poem also takes a certain ability to re-integrate into the original moments of impulse and linkage. It’s all hard, it’s all easy, it invites us into our lives. I strongly encourage people to “go for” even seven minutes of writing a day, to stay tuned. Even when you don’t have larger blocks of time — small blocks can help keep your focus clarified and exercised. You retain the ability to jump right into a page without too much hesitation or reservation.

Is there any agenda that orientates your current and/or new writings?

Fascination with narrative movement, characters being revealed so quickly through conversation.

Also, weaving my precious father’s voice (using his notebooks and unpublished writings and old letters to editors, etc.) through a series of poems to him — the ongoing conversation after a most-beloved person dies.