Poetry as Rock Formation

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In an interview at the Huffington Post, poet James Kimbrell compared the act of writing poetry to the slow formation of stalactites out of hollow straws of rock over thousands of years:

But what creates that shape and form organically is repetition—of dropping water, of water through a particular porous passage in the rocks. I think if you have a force, a voice, a statement, on the one hand, that may seem not terribly formally coherent—if it goes through a passage over time, form starts to work its own magic. It doesn’t end up being forced; it ends up being something that comes out of the repetition of a certain action over a period of time. I think the poems happen that way.

Kelly Lynn Thomas reads, writes, and sometimes sews in Pittsburgh, PA. Her creative work has appeared in Sou’wester, Thin Air Magazine, Heavy Feather Review, metazen, and others, and she received her MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University. She is hopelessly obsessed with Star Wars and can always be found with a large mug of tea. She also runs the very small Wild Age Press. Read more at kellylynnthomas.com. More from this author →