When American poet Thomas Lux selected your first book, Good Hope Road, as a winner of the National Poetry Series, he described your poems as “rambunctious and wise, angry and funny and graceful.”

Thomas Lux’s descriptors were wonderfully generous. The “Apartments” series that opens Good Hope Road was propelled by an energy that was “rambunctious” as a young person’s emotions might well be — although I was well into my thirties when I wrote it. I was trying in those poems to use both anger and humor and to work in a more demotic way than the poems I had been writing earlier. They were also closer to the emotions of their speakers in their effort to capture the cadences and inflections of spoken language. I am not sure what Lux meant by “graceful” — he certainly was not thinking of it in a religious sense. I know when I am being angry or funny. As for wisdom, perhaps he was referring to my being from Atlantic City where there are lots of wise guys.

I see your poems as rambunctious, funny, and wise, but angry and graceful to a lesser extent. I enjoyed the book, especially for the humor. Therein lies your wisdom, or at least its conduit. What makes a humorous poem more than a poem that gets a laugh?

Humor is certainly one of the elements at play in my poetry and was also how I defended myself as a child. Sometimes there was a price to pay for being funny, as well there should be. Some “funny” poetry is indeed as you say “trivial” and appeals to the worst sense of the audience: the wish to be passively entertained. And in the case of poetry readings, it’s especially easy to get a laugh when the reader becomes merely a listener. And that again is “trivial.” I don’t think humor is always so funny. When it works best it’s painful.

How so?

Think about Stanley Kunitz’s poem “The Portrait” with its marvelous diction and line-breaks. The subject of the poem, the father’s suicide, is certainly not funny nor is the poem written in a joking manner — yet there is decidedly to my mind a macabre humor at work, particularly in the pacing and line breaks of first six lines of the poem that comprise the opening sentence.

The first line is certainly not humorous, nor is the second but when it is taken together as two pieces of sense, I can’t help but give a little laugh as if to ward off the horror and terror. This is humor that derives from the deep mine of darkness. The word “awkward” seems almost humorous in this context as well. It’s a brilliant opening and shows what free verse can do best with lineation and voice.