Writing

I’ve written poems since I was young. I used to imagine words were alive, clustering together or going off making stories on their own when they weren’t hanging around people. I still feel there’s something to that. After I gave birth to my son, the personal I of my poems shattered into other characters living lives I’d never lived, with voices that seemed to come from my grandfather’s people. And so I fell into fiction and learned stories were irreducible truths, unable to be explained. But my roots—my original connection to words—still lie in poetry. I need poems the way another might need a cigarette, or as Rilke said (but about God), “...like I need a crowbar or a hoe.” That fits. And it also brings us to the ground. I love the “under-verbal”—long stretches of silence immersed in my garden and with our animals on our defunct farm.