I did not know much about poetry, and knew even less about writing poetry until my junior year at Columbia.  I was looking for a course to fit into an open time slot in my schedule and came across "Modern Poetry" in the college course guide.  Since up to that point in my education poetry was anything but modern, I thought it might be interesting.  As it turns out, the course had a profound influence on my life.  The professor teaching the class was Kenneth Koch, a founding member of "The New York School of Poets" along with John Ashbury, Frank O'Hara, and James Shuyler.  I had not heard of Koch, but quickly came to realize how important a figure he was in the literary world.  It is hard to decide how his body of work has influenced me the most.  His books on education are classics in the field and his poetry is among the finest of the 20th century.

Koch used imitation as a way to help us become more intimate with a poet's style and with the creative process in general.  I wrote terrible poetry during my two semesters with him, but that was fine.  I was writing and learning, and ever so slowly developing a style of my own.  As a graduate student at Fordham I took a course with Ed Wakin who taught me a lot about the editorial process.  In the years that followed, I began writing things in various genres and submitting to magazines and newspapers.  Slowly I began to find some success and attempted to build on it.  Success with poetry sort of came as a surprise.  I was much more involved with journalism, but found that after practicing with many styles of poetry and reading as much as I could, I developed a style that worked for me.  I found that the concise use of language in poetry and journalism make those genres more similar than one might imagine.

I like to draw inspiration from the everyday events that make up a lifetime and have become especially interested in bringing the memoir process into poetry.  Poetry does not change the world or the people in it.  It can make people think, feel, and be a little happier for a while, and that is probably enough.  It is a wonderful tool for self-examination and for preserving life's little moments sort of like photographs are able to do.

If I have any "mission" as a poet, it is to bring poetry into the literary mainstream.  For so long, poetry has been covered by a shroud of mystery, as if one needed a special gift to be able to read, write, and enjoy it.  I would like poetry to be something that the general public reads and looks forward to like the latest work by a best-selling novelist or the new CD by a chart-topping recording artist.