A few notes on poetry

and its purpose in a dark age of anti-meaning

Writing poetry is a total joy for me. It doesn't matter if I'm writing gibberish in the margins of a notebook or editing something that might be presentable to a reader.

The process of cleaving meaning from the world (through language) is a thrill and gives my life foundational purpose.

Or as Cid Corman put it:

Alive or dead
I’m in it for
the poetry.

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The poem begins with an impulse to make a sound that bends and leads toward meaning. The sound finds the language, not the other way around. And the world spills in — the images bleed through — and what began as an impulse becomes a way of being — human! — amid chaos.