For the Boston Review, Jericho Brown shares why he identifies with poetry and what it means to find “joy” in the writing process:
I love writing because it is the moment at which I am at once both completely present (paying close attention to my own thinking) and completely absent (as the language for that thinking flows through me). I don’t think about competition or rejection while I’m writing because I can’t remember that I’m in the present tense or that there is a future. If I think about any other poet at all, it is because I’m trying to make use of a strategy I’ve learned from his or her poems, that strategy being yet another part of my reading experience I get to use as material.
