I'm another who was always a reader and a writer, my whole life. I read everything I could get my hands on, including poetry-- I still have a copy of Where the Sidewalk Ends that my babysitter gave to me when I was six. I drifted away from poetry as I got older, and then in college, partly thanks to the wonderful works of Paul Zarzyski, and a book of Billy Collins given to me by my high school librarian, I drifted back.

I've come to see prose as a panorama, a picture of everything around you in all its detail, where poetry is a pinhole camera, one small thing enlarged until it fills the world. Poetry has always been about moments for me, tiny moments captured and explored in the depth we simply don't have time to give them in the ordinary course of life. It's a chance for me to pause and delve deeply into my mind and the world I live in.

I particularly like ordered poetry-- sonnets, sestinas, cinquains, etherees-- because they sort the chaos into something recognizable, but all poetry has a calming effect.