I have had a number of phases in my writing career. To begin with, I was a surrealist. My first collection of poems The Folk Hero Midget was a surrealist collection which used imagery to disguise what I was saying and to present to the reader what I felt was the absurdity of the world around me. It was also heavily influenced by my drug use which was quite bad during the years I wrote the poems in that collection as well as when I was putting it together.

Following that my poetry changed from being more honest and focused on the personal interaction of the characters that were central to the poem. This has been the main style of my work since my second collection There Are Words up until my most recent work. Of course, I did fall back into my old surrealist habit in that book. Now I am soon to release a new book Little Paper Fishes and have enough material to put together a seventh collection. But lately, I have struggled with the idea of just continuing along with writing poetry in the same mode with no change of style or substance and I was resolved that I would.

The long and short of it is that I hit upon the idea of writing poetry using Japanese forms such as Waka, Tanka, Haiku, and solo Renga. I have found this to be an exciting challenge to learn the forms and what makes a good Haiku for example, as opposed to writing one that is just mediocre and doggerel in nature. So this is the style that I will be working on for the next few years perhaps as I see if I can take these forms and alter them and my way of thinking so that they can be used to tell my experience as an immigrant, a father and a man.