exponentially experiential

A poem should gather force from experience and release that force through language.

prison release

There comes a point always, in painting a picture, when it becomes a prison; I long to get away from it, to be quit of it forever, yet the only release, with a clear conscience, must come from carrying it thru.

—Charles Burchfield

Charles Burchfield’s Journals, The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (State University of New York Press, 1993)

desperate struggle

The poem is a desperate struggle between release and resolve.