Poet/Writer
Give Me Words
I believe in writing. I love words. I love them short and fat, like “body.” I love them sprightly, like “light.” Lightning bug, light-hearted, light as a feather. I love them slow and tender, like “hand.” Hand in glove, handsome, handmade. We need words to know and to express what we know.
Let me, with writing, embrace the world. Let me play its music—the gentle tapping of keys, the earlier clanging of typewriter cartridges, the even-earlier scratching of pens on parchment. Let me, with writing, invoke histories.
Words let us celebrate. “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!,” Lewis Carroll chortles in “Jabberwocky.” And words let us mourn. How do we bear the certain knowledge of our own period, the loss of people and things we love? How do we bear life? We write.
If we write to preserve, we also write to bury. Only when we snatch our ideas, experiences, feelings from the buzzing swarm and trap them on the page, only then are we free. Get the words on the page, then you can deal with them. They are not you.
But writing is you. Despite the formality of printed letters, writing is a deeply individual act. Writing manifests our essence—if it’s honest writing.
When I step though that door, I give it all. But writing replenishes me: I’m not out of words. May we never be out of words.
Preparing for My First Big Poetry Reading
I could write a poem about speaking poems
silently, how they beat in my head
when I’m running or driving or walking down the hall,
language the center of my heartbeat. I could write
a poem about reading poems aloud, practicing
in front of the big mirror in my study, seeing
my voice breathe out, inscribing words on air. I could
write a poem about hearing poems,
your poems, my own poems, words dropping
like leaves or hail into space, into souls.
Writing Before Dawn
“I rarely end up where I mean to go, but often I end up where I need to be.” –Detective Dirk Gently, in Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul
Words rarely get me where I mean to go,
No matter if I start in dark or light.
Yet often I end up where I need to be.
Ink flows across the page: I think I know
My journey’s end, that dawn of rich insight.
I rarely get to where I mean to go.
My words flood forth to cut a channel deep,
Then they meander, bars and swales delight.
Often I end up where I need to be.
I know I need to float within the flow,
No ifs or buts or nors or even mights.
Those rarely get me where I mean to go.
I’ve hit a rock – oh, this is agony,
I’ll never, no, I’ll never get this right!
– often I end up where I need to be.
There’s power in these words that flow so free:
The body knows the way to depth and height.
Words rarely get me where I mean to go
But often, finally, where I need to be.