When I didn’t find answers in my family or in my neighborhood or my teachers, I looked inside. When I looked inside, I found art–-especially music and literature. The first words that ever truly shook my world were lyrics to rock songs, and most of those songs were by Bruce Springsteen. When he sang, in “Backstreets,” “Once soft infested summer/Me and Terry became friends/Trying in vain to breathe/ The fire we were born in” and, in “Thunder Road, “This is a town full of losers/And I’m pulling out of here to win,” I said, “Hey, that’s me.” The world suddenly got bigger. That’s the only way I can say it. His was the first of many voices that made me think of the place I grew up in as only one of many places, as a place I was going to live in only for a little while. Springsteen’s music, more than anything else at that time, gave me permission to have big dreams. His music led me to start thinking that some day I was going to be somebody. Springsteen has had that impact on a lot of people. I tried to pay homage to the influence of both rock music and poetry on my life in the beginning of the book, where I quote Springsteen and T.S. Eliot. You used an interesting word by saying powerfully. I asked a lot of questions of myself and these questions ultimately led me to become a writer.

I grew up in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, a place of row houses and old mills, a place without a large margin of error. People didn’t have much there, but they had pride, and sometimes that pride led to fights and shouting and threats and so on. Street fights were pretty common. Several times, I got in street fights because I thought I had to. I thought it was my responsibility to go out and stick up for my family, just like in “Streetfighting” where I said, “I raced out the front door / wanting someone to stop me, / mix of who I was and thought I had to be / swirling in my head since he [my father] left us / in inner-city Philadelphia.” No one told me not to do it. I would have stopped if someone had told me, “Stop. This is crazy. You’re just a boy.”

Before they moved out of the city, I often went back to Kensington to visit my mother and sister. When I drove those old streets, it was very emotional for me. I am able to see now that we lived in a bad part of a wonderful city. There is plenty that is beautiful in Philadelphia. Without question, it’s my favorite city, even with all that happened there while I was growing up. I am reminded of Wordsworth’s words about poetry being the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions recollected in tranquility. It took a while for the tranquility and the larger perspective to come. It also took a while for me to come to terms with the mysteries surrounding what happened in that place. You can never truly get to the bottom of the past, but if you’re lucky you can get close enough so you don’t have to spend so much time looking through it like an old junk drawer. When you get to that point, you can appreciate the beauty of the present more fully and with your new perspective look again at the past in a new, fuller light.

Along the way, I introduce characters like Buddy Fisher, One-Eyed Timmy, Jimmy, and George, all of whom are based on real people I knew. George, for instance, is based on a guy who was awful at his life—an irresponsible father and husband, an unreliable employee, a chronic drug user—but was the most beautiful basketball player I ever played against. He was in absolute control on a basketball court, raining three pointers, making smart passes, calming everyone down and running the show when games got close. Amazing. For him, basketball was a creative outlet. It provided him with what Robert Frost called “a momentary stay against confusion” that I have since found in poetry. At least he had basketball. It scares me to think that when some people look inside themselves, they don’t find anything.

I hope my work pushes up against some of the same questions. In my childhood, I was given the landscape of Philadelphia. In a broader sense, though, I have been given the same range of human frailties and strengths to work with that any other artist has been given. I will always return to examine that landscape in my mind. In that sense, I’ll always be a Philadelphia writer. While my writing may be set in Philadelphia or in some other specific place, I hope the hearts alive in the writing are recognizable to readers with all kinds of backgrounds. I’m not saying I’m in the same league as the people I just mentioned. I’m saying only that I recognize their impulses.

The range between the oldest and newest poem in the book is twelve years. That’s a long time. As I see it, the poems in Streetfighting make up the emotional and intellectual map that has led me to where I am in my life. The book is ultimately about a coming to terms. It has a happy ending, I think. It’s about life being more than just hard. I see the poems speaking to each other in funky ways across the years of their composition.

The working title for my next book is “Start With the Trouble,” which is a motto about beginning one’s work by completing the hardest part first. Once you finish the hard part, you’re home free. I don’t know if I’m home free, but I feel like I’ve gotten through what a lot of people, for a lot of reasons, don’t get through. I feel very lucky. The next manuscript is chock full of poems about my daughter, Abigail, and my wife, Karen, and my adult life. It’s got its share of Philly poems, too.

It is important to think about beginnings and endings. When I am teaching creative writing classes, I ask students to put together a portfolio of their work at the end of the term. Along the way, I ask them to write a poem of invitation or introduction—whatever that means to them. Some students have written about themselves or their hometowns, others their friends or family, still others the work in their portfolio. I also ask them to write a good-bye poem. These are some of the finest poems my students have written, because they usually come late in the term, after we’ve discussed the power or imagery, suggestion, mystery, and things like that. Those will be the first and last pieces in the portfolio. The students then need to find surprising, interesting, and logical ways to love from one piece to the next until they get to the good-bye poem.

I’ve already talked about “The One Time I Paid Attention at Friday Morning Mass,” which I hope provides a tone of the introduction to the book. I had trouble finding the final poem for the book. For a while, it was going to be “Halfies in Philadelphia and the Ritual of Desire,” which ends on a high note and suggests a world beyond the book. I had a breakthrough, though, when I wrote “Fresh Start: Staining the Pool Deck.” That was a real breakout poem for me. Something happened about halfway through when I wanted the poem to turn and address certain things but it simply resisted. It demanded to go in a new, strange direction. Soon enough, Richard Wright was in the poem. Bob Dylan. Raskolnikov. These people had broken through one kind of knowing and charged head-first into a more important and sustaining kind. They were lucky, yet none escaped unscathed. I saw the arc of my story following in that general path. Not to the same magnitude, perhaps, but in the same direction. Once I finished that poem, I knew it had to be the last poem in the book. Whatever poems come next move forward from the affirmations put forth in the book’s final poem.