Why is poetry important?
As a practice, it’s like writing proofs or doing algebra. You build something based on some half-heard scrap of something that has its own rules, its own logic. You’re trying to delve into it, to come to the illogical conclusion. You work in concert with it, or let it lead you around on a leash to where it’s going to go. It has made me more sane to write this way. Frank Bidart in that famous interview in In the Western Night talks about using poetry to think his life, and knowing that if he could do that there was everything yet to be done. I’ve been listening to a lot of J. Krishnamurti recently and he has this beautiful thing that he says to his students or querents, “Don’t just guess! Go into it! Carefully!” That’s what I’m trying to do when I write a poem: I’m trying to go into it carefully, and then all at once, and come back with something that helps me understand myself and the world a little bit more. I think that’s really the only kind of peace I know outside of being outside or having sex. I mean peace in the sense that I’m not trying to escape myself, but am deeply, deeply present to myself.
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