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Join NOW!Back on March 25th, David Biespiel started a project he titled “The Poet’s Journey.” Now, after over 5 months, the journey is coming to an end. But if you want to relive it as a piece, here are links to all of them. Preamble Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter […]
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As a poet, you seek to blend your imagination with what you are both witnessing and imagining: “The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person.”
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When you do not allow yourself to follow your impulses, it’s not that you are eluding or destroying those impulses. Instead, you’re converting what was potentially necessary to your imagination into something darker, less stable, and more insidious.
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As a poet you are called to be absorbed and aroused and enchanted and intoxicated and beguiled. You embrace occasions that leave you seduced and transfixed, overpowered and enraptured.
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There’s a unitary circulation between poet and reader. The poet dwells in the gap between dream and waking, and the reader is offered entryway to become alive and enlivened.
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While poetry reveals what is fantastic and dangerous, a poem is not a fairytale escape. The triumphs in a poem are foremost triumphs of the imagination more so than the soul.
...moreThe ritual of poetic discovery is a reanimation of the whole metaphor of human dream and reason, irrationality and rationality, the ancient and the contemporary, the organic and the artifice.
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Every time you write a poem, you’re learning to become a poet once again. Your writing imitates not the banal sequence from life to death, but instead imitates a descent into and out of a new womb of clarity.
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