Frankly, writing poetry for children is plain old fun, and I consider myself blessed to have such a delightful career.

I’m working now on a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, about 100 of them, that I may publish if anyone’s interested. My take on life is a little different from the bard’s.

It’s Halloween! It’s Halloween! The moon is full and bright And we shall see what can’t be seen On any other night. Skeletons and ghosts and ghouls, Grinning goblins fighting duels, Werewolves rising from their...

I accept challenges, I have always done that in writing.

I’ve been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe.

I always knew would be some sort of artist, but didn’t know what.

My reading is extremely eclectic. Lately I’ve been teaching myself computer graphics, so I’m reading a lot about that. I read books of trivia, of facts.

I keep a guitar around while writing and will improvise music. I do this for several reasons, such as that it’s fun, and sometimes it helps me with the meter.

My wife used to tell me one of my best qualities was that my feet don’t smell, but I remember my brother’s did when we were kids.

I look for poetry in English because it’s the only language I read.

Otherwise I don’t read much adult poetry at all, because I’m not smart enough and mostly I don’t get it.

I often repeat repeat myself,I often repeat repeat.I don’t don’t know why know why,I simply know that I I Iam am inclined to say to saya lot a lot this way this way-I often repeat...

I would go to sketch groups and draw. I really enjoyed the subject matter, but I wasn’t good at it.

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn’t. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished...

The BALLPOINT PENGUINS, black and white, Do little else but write and write.Although they’ve nothing much to say, They write and write it anyway….

I write the poems first, with only a few exceptions for odd reasons, where I’m given the illustration first.

Then I decided to draw from and on my own imagination, and everything came out perfect.

You’re nasty and you’re loud,you’re mean enough for two,If I could be a cloud,I’d rain all day on you.

I’m incredibly excited about Awful Ogre. The ogre is my alter ego. It’s a day in the life of an ogre, from when he gets up until he goes to bed.

There’s not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do.

I invented animals and birds – I had about two dozen. After working on them for six months, I sat down and just for fun wrote two dozen poems to accompany the drawings. It was...

I’m mostly influenced by life, what’s around me, and my own childhood.

We all need ways to express ourselves, and poetry is one of mine.

After I’d produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me...

I’m never bored.

When I began writing, I didn’t read any other children’s poets… I didn’t want to be influenced until I’d found my own voice. Now I read them all.

Children seem naturally drawn to poetry – it’s some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.

I’m usually working on eight or 10 things at once.

Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood.