Poetry didnât find me, in the cradle or anywhere near it; I found it. I realized at some pointâvery late, itâs always seemedâthat I needed it, that it served a function for me or someday would, however unclear that function may have been first. I seemed to have started writing poetry before Iâd read any. Although why this should have seemed to have been so much of a sin eludes me now, it reinforced the uneasy feeling that Iâd had to create the interest in myself rather than having it dawn on me in some splendid conflagration. Iâd always read a lot, but I wasnât particularly compelled by words for their own sake, or by âliterature,â which had always repelled me with its auras of mustiness and reverence. I detested almost any book I had to read, hated English in school, and I must have been surprised, maybe even a little put off, to find myself, just as the dreary poetry survey courses ended, turning the stuff out myself. I started writing one day for no real reason (I had a girl who liked poetry, or liked the idea of me writing it anyway: not much of a clue), but once I did, I knew, I canât remember exactly how, that the realities poetry offered me differed in essential and splendid ways from those of every day. My every days were all either tormented with confusions of one sort or another, or were intolerably humdrum. There was something about the way poetry isolated experience, its powers of demarcation, that promised a way to endow experience with forms that if nothing would be at least more dramatically satisfying.
snowghoul
2087
andulkaphoto
turnnoffyourmind
janainaart
blakekathryn
