How did you first engage with poetry?
Legend has it my mother read poetry to me every night I was in her womb, so I’d like to think verse was with me even in those unconscious, twilit months. Once in the larger world, nursery rhymes, song lyrics, and poetry itself stoked my interest in the fires that language made possible. I moved around a lot as a kid, sometimes to places where I didn’t speak the language (France, for example) or practice the dominant religion (aka Utah), so being foreign became familiar and I was allowed to listen without expectation of speaking. This meant I got to get sensitive to language, to spend time with its tones and focus on its physicality, the way we move words through us—the stomach, the lungs, the throat, the tongue, the teeth, the lips—until they arrive, if you understand them, at meaning or if you don’t, at music. And that’s what keeps pulling me back to poetry—the way that music and meaning mirror and mar each other and how I can push that process forward.
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