1. What or who gives you inspiration and perspiration?

I get inspiration – this is so cheesy, but it’s true – from everything, really. The food I eat, the people I love, the television, the news. Lately I’ve been working a lot with biblical concepts – I spent eight years in a relationship with The Church, and I guess you could say we stopped seeing each other about two years ago. Since then, I’ve mostly avoided thinking about faith and spirituality too much, but it seems like over the past six months, I’ve been ready to re-examine my life through that lens. So yeah, right now the bible seems to be giving me some inspiration.

I also have to mention, of course, the people who encouraged me most in my writing over the past eight years: Adele Bourne, one of the first people who ever took an interest in me seriously as a poet; Dan Maguire, another New Jersey poet who has taken so much time out to encourage me in writing; and of course BJ Ward, the first poetry professor I ever had, and a poet that I respect, admire, and really just like as a person.

What gives me perspiration? Definitely the ocean and deep space. I have some pretty deep-seated phobias, and I’m hoping to work them into poems at some point, of course.

2. Have you always wanted to write, or did you have a secret desire for something else, like spelunking?

Oh gosh – when I was little, I wanted to be all sorts of things: a nurse, a criminal defense lawyer (I think I just liked the way it sounded), a photojournalist. I started writing around the age of 12, but I don’t think I realized it was something that I personally could do until well into my 20s. I think mostly I wanted to be a teacher – French, Literature, whatever, I just really wanted to teach. But eventually I figured out that writing was going to be a huge part of my life, whether personally or professionally.

Now I’ve decided not to pursue writing academically, so there are no plans for an MFA. But I know it’s not something I will ever be able to separate from, and that’s fine with me. I’ll continue to write and workshop with peers, read, and hopefully publish. I’m having fun with it, and I don’t want to stop.

3. Do awards and accolades make you swoon? Have there been any that you're particularly swoon-y about that you've gotten?

Of course they make me swoon! I still get really excited, and the first thing I do when I have good poetry news is ring my best friend Anna (who is a formal poet and editor of The Barefoot Muse) to share the news. We’ve been that way since we met, really – seven years of phone calls to talk about awards and publications as we find out about them.

I think, right now, I’m really proud of the fact that Finishing Line Press wanted to publish my first chapbook, Ripe Again. The poems in this collection were written over a span of four years, and they reveal my growth in that time, I think, both as a writer and as a human being. The poems really catalog my process of self-discovery, and I’m really proud that someone else saw the value in that.

4. When you're not leaving your poetic footprint, what else in the world makes you warm and fuzzy?

Oh, a huge list of things: reading great poetry, flannel sheets, eating sushi with my girlfriend, hanging out in Philadelphia or the Pine Barrens, spending time with my brother in California, good music, trashy reality television…I could go on for hours.

One thing I really want to do next year is a get a bit more involved in social change; I want to do something that’s less focused on my little bubble in the world, and more focused on helping push for a change in the world out there. Of course that’s a really vague answer, mostly because I don’t know yet what I’m going to do. But I’ll figure it out – it’s becoming pretty important to me now to work that out.

5. Give me names. Who are the best new poets, in your opinion?

I’m glad you asked, because I really love this question – I like to ask other poets, when I go to see them, who they like to read.

So, let’s see – I just got Michelle Bitting’s chapbook Blue Laws from Finishing Line Press, and I think she’s amazing. She’s also been in Boxcar Poetry Review and 21 Stars, and I’m just totally flattened by her work – her poetry has teeth.

I think Patrick Rosal – who isn’t exactly “new” but also isn’t a Poet Laureate yet – is great. I think you could loosely call him a performance poet – his book, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, is full of urban rhythms and a huge amount of soul. I read it in January of 2007, and I’m still repeating some of the lines to myself.

Emari DiGiorgio is one of my favorite “undiscovered” poets – she’s a professor at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey, and she writes these really powerful poems with strong women and snarky voices. I think she has a lot of important things to say, and a lot of her work is really exciting.

And I’ve only read one of his poems so far, but Patrick Ryan Frank has this totally amazing poem in Boxcar Poetry Review called “Virginitiphobia” – I cannot explain well enough how chilling this poem is. If this poem is any indication, Frank is going to be a fantastic find.

6. Best of the Net or Pushcart? Which matters more and why?

I think there’s really room for both prizes. I know that online journals can submit nominations for Pushcart Prizes, but I don’t have any statistics on how those poems fare – and because the online poetry community is still fairly new in comparison with print small press journals, I think the likelihood of online journals being represented really well within the Pushcart awards is not as good as it could be. So I think Best of the Net is an important award, because there are some really great ezines publishing excellent work out there – obviously I like TWC, but also Wicked Alice, Boxcar Poetry Review, Sunken Lines and Apple Valley Review, just to name a small handful. I think both awards really have a place of importance in the poetry world right now, and though I’d like to see the print and the electronic communities really come together, I think it’s important to maintain Best of the Net as a category all its own.

7. Then and now. What poem made you start writing and what poem do you absolutely love right this very moment?

Oh, I’m so embarrassed to admit this, but the first poem I really, really loved was a Charles Bukowski poem. I’ve learned over the past 14 years that there are much better poets than Bukowski, but at 14 years old, reading the words “cunt” and “fuck” written by a totally unapologetic curmudgeon is so liberating. I think the poem that really made me love poetry, though, was Bukowski’s “For Jane: With All the Love I Had Which Was Not Enough.” The poem itself is sort of listy, kind of clever-for-clever’s-sake – but there’s anguish in it, a real sense of loss and longing, and that was so important for me to feel at the time – it made me really want to affect people in the way that poem affected me. Even now, 14 years after first reading that poem, I still really feel like crying when I think about Jane.

Right now there are so many poems I love. I think, having just read Michelle Bitting’s book, that I could probably pick one of her poems; or the Patrick Ryan Frank poem I read earlier. But the one poem that I have loved for at least three years without a break in Anne Sexton’s “With Mercy for the Greedy.” I think I’ve adopted that as a sort of personal theme poem. Again, there’s a sense of anguish in that poem, a sense of Sexton’s narrator really trying to find something, to belong to something – but, as she says in the poem, “Need is not quite belief.” That poem has helped me understand that wanting or needing something is not always enough.

8. Are online poetry 'zines a crushing blow to traditional print 'zines, or are they the meat and potatoes of the poetry world now? Also, which do you prefer?

You know, again, I think there’s really room for both in the poetry world. I don’t think the print journals are going away any time soon, but I think online journals are doing some really amazing things. I like the accessibility of online journals, the immediacy of them – and I think a lot of online journals are a bit edgier in terms of content and non-traditional forms. But there is really something to be said for print journals – I will always love the feel of paper between my fingers.

9. Where do you see yourself and your poems in five years?

In five years I really hope my poems have grown quite a bit. I’d like to write poems that really reflect our culture, poems that have something important to say about who we are as a society and how we can change. I’d like in the next five years to have a full-length collection out, though that’s an ambitious task.

As for where I see myself – well, I’d like to be a little thinner, a bit smarter, a better friend and a better mother. But we’ll see. I’ll settle for better-read.

10. What are the ingredients for a tasty poem?

Oh, another one of my favorite questions. I really think poems need to be clear – no abstractions, no vague ideas, no blathering on about grand concepts. I like poems to taste like concrete: verbs, nouns, grit, textures, sensations. My teeth should hurt after chewing on a poem for awhile. Language used in usual ways – nouns as action, verbs like “unpocket,” stuff like that. I want poems that make me feel I’m being poked over and over again with a dull fork.

I want to read what poetry is going to be, not what it already is.