When I’ve been running regularly and writing regularly, it tends to go well. When I haven’t been running or writing in a while, then I’m bent over heaving for breath and wondering why I ever thought I knew how to write a sentence.
It’s always been ground glass, scraping against my insides. I imagine a light held to the place where I open would illuminate a mess of torn flesh, throbbing red-wet.
To reduce a poem to a purely autobiographical, experiential reading feels limiting to me. To reduce a poem to an “aboutness” seems limiting to me. The poet Allen Grossman said, “A poem is about a thing the way a cat is about a house.”
In one of Jane Goodall’s early books, there’s a photo of two chimpanzees sitting on a height watching the sun set. Are they enjoying the colors the way we do?…