You know how we are when a new book of poems is at last coming together – all frenzy, distraction, and bounty? It’s as if I’ve turned into summer itself.
There’s so much rage in the world now and I’m finding poems to be the place where I want to stay. I rage and rage and then write a poem and return to breathing.
I kind of hate it.” Or, “Oh you wait tables? I didn’t know that was something people did.” I say it can be invigorating because, on some level, we have to evaluate what we do and why we do it almost daily.
I have been writing. Even when I intend not to write, I find myself writing. I’m currently in a place where I should be putting together the fifth book, but then more poems are coming. It’s exciting and somewhat daunting.
I’m always talking about how the poems I am most obsessed with are like people: complex and unknowable and with a huge capacity for many different emotions.
Language can also be play and music and beauty and desire and grief and rage and truth without always having to be message-driven or purely functional.
I think, as poets, we are in the odd position of constantly defending our art form. Which is funny and also sort of invigorating, too. No one really says, “Oh you’re a lawyer? I’ve never understood the law. In fact,
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