bodily function

I don’t write until I feel a physical necessity to commit a feeling or a notion to text. Writing as a bodily function.

revolution of dreams

Because the mechanistic imagery I had used so far had begun to horrify me, and certainly contradicted in intent and almost in coloration what I wanted to do next, it suggests that a new imagery must be found, less like a crustacean’s shell. But to change one’s images is like trying to revolutionize one’s dreams. It can’t be done overnight. Nor can it be effected by will. I find one entry reading: “Something seems to have been broken in me last year, like a spring breaking…What broke…is perhaps the sense that you can build your life by choice. Now I think you build it out of necessities—and that is all you can do is answer these necessities in the decentest way possible…I am trying to learn to lead a decent life and not want to be a great person and, at the same time, know what I have the human right to draw the line at.”

—Jane Cooper, “Nothing Has Been Used in the Manufacture of This Poetry That Could Have Been Used in the Manufacture of Bread,” essay in The Flashboat: Poems Collected and Reclaimed (Norton, 2000)

not a luxury

I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

—Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not A Luxury,” Lofty Dogmas: Poets on Poetics (U. of Arkansas Press, 2005), edited by Deborah Brown, Annie Finch and Maxim Kumin

poem you should never have started

The poem you should never have started is the only poem you must finish.