Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?
Yes and it's both a painful thing and one filled with new possibilities. I've known and wrote in conventional forms, but it was reading James Joyce that kind of steered me into conceptual poetry. Constructing new forms and new ways of presenting language through assemblage and visual art really appealed to the sensory things I love about poetry.
But I also found the world of conceptual poetry to be restrictive in terms of class and racial appropriation. Poets feeling they're above feeling and circumstances just did not appeal to me. Poetry is meant to enlighten, yes, but it is one that moves the world forward from its conception to its fruition. It is not meant to destroy. A lot of conceptualism is based on harm and awe instead of substance and the building of new ideas.
Thus, poetry should be a work that is open to criticism, not matter what the subject matter, and it can be best responded with more poetry of a better calibre. I mean, poetry that is less about the poet and more about the world it is deconstructing.
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