How does a poem begin?
Sometimes a poem will begin with an image for me – a scene from a dream or a memory or something I witness while I'm walking around the city or driving in my car. Or it might begin with a phrase that sticks in my head. Place is also important in my work, and I have many poems that begin as meditations on a particular location. Most often, my poems emerge out of my anxiety and my desire to make sense of complicated emotions. I try to write my way out of whatever is particularly troubling or difficult in my life at that moment. Form is a way for me to explore those emotions in a controlled space – within the confines of meter or rhyme, I feel free to go to scary places in my heart and mind.
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