Then, I didn’t know my own light 

So I could 

Then, I saw the forest and thought forest 

I saw the sea and held the waves dear 

Free to hurt as much as could be 

So I could 

For me there was a time 

I could believe all I could see 

I’m taking a shower and a sentence comes to me. Nothing impressive or fancy, just an ordinary sentence. The sentence is, “Now my day has begun.” The moment that sentence starts, a voice arises within me. A speaker. 

I get out of the shower and drink a glass of water as I think. Who does that voice belong to? What life are they living? What is “my day,” and why, now, how has it “begun”? I think it over slowly. I write the sentence on a Post-it note and stick it to my computer monitor. Every time I look at it, I let my imagination grow a little bigger. 

I never rush into a poem. Sometimes I think about a single poem for a year or more. There are Post-it notes all over my monitor. They don’t all grow into poems, so sometimes I stop looking at one for a while. But someday, some of them might become poems. Because my poetry isn’t over yet.

There isn’t any big reason why I can’t rush into a poem. This is where it starts to get too conceptual, but to put it a bit nebulously, I think of a sentence as something like a seed. You can’t pick it the moment you’ve planted it. It feels like you have to let the thought ripen and grow until it’s outside your control. Of course, it’s all about the feeling, so some thoughts quickly grow into poems, while others don’t work out at all, or take a long time. I’m kind of old-fashioned and stuck in my ways in that respect. But it’s not easy to fix, because I don’t know any other way. Not that I’ve thought much about fixing it. When poetry becomes a struggle, sometimes I think there’s something wrong with my craft, and I wonder how other poets do it. But you can’t just ask another poet how to write poetry. Even if you ask, all you get in response is a laugh. 

Now my day has begun. 

A single line, cleared away on either side. The time spent looking at a single line, firming up the ground for an idea as it grows thick and lush, is one of the most exhausting but also exciting parts of writing poetry. If I were a farmer, it would be the time spent waiting after scattering the seed. Can this thinking and waiting be considered part of the writer’s labor? Not in the case of the farmer, but the writer must always embody two separate aspects. I can’t just be the farmer; I also have to be the seed in the soil, pushing up a sprout. Even an unsprouted seed is a world within itself, an infinitely stirring window. The preheating of thought is an essential moment to poetry. Which is why I want to claim even the time I spend rolling around in bed doing nothing as my labor time. 

The books, shows, movies, and music that I come into contact with in my everyday life have an outsized influence on the brainstorming process. At the idea stage, even happenstance encounters like these can have an effect. This is something I enjoy—watching the chemical reaction within me as the many books I’m reading blend together. There is a strange synergy in reading books from completely different fields at the same time. Drawn into those operations, my sentences and the ideas they catalyze come to a boil. Sometimes, though unfortunately not always, a spark flies, and I can leap to some point beyond myself. That’s the joy of writing poetry. 

Some misunderstandings are so sweet 

I can’t bring myself to quit 

I wish you would cry looking at me 

From behind bended knee 

Then I want to burst into laughter 

I want to become a tangled mess 

If you were standing on a cliff, I’d push you off.

Once I start writing, I can write. I write, and I read, and I write again. I write until I finally think, that’s enough. But when is enough? Of course, it’s all about the feeling, so I could never say exactly, but I often think I want to go on forever, until I can’t write another word—to the ends of language. I want it to take me somewhere I could never go. Then maybe it would feel like I could go on living. In this tiresome world, what frees me from this body and sends me soaring is literature. Not always, but while I’m writing, for one second at a time, those moments come to me. Moments when everything falls into place so naturally and inevitably. I love that momentary compatibility. 

When there are deadlines to meet, I can’t always work this way. While I put all the strength I have into one poem, I’m also writing other poems little by little, whenever I have a free second. Poems that rely on a particular scene, or poems that somehow fall into place at the most precarious moment—those are the ones that are good to write that way. Sometimes a poem just flows out of me without putting much time into it at all. 

If I put an apple and a revolving door down on the page together, the tension between the two objects can make the poem poetic. What makes the poem into poetry isn’t the apple and revolving door, but the empty space between them. To adjust that empty space, to play at making it wider or narrower, is one of the most interesting parts of my job. No matter how much you do it, it’s always new. I’d almost dare to say that this is where poetry’s beauty comes from. It’s a kind of experiment—calculating the appropriate distance between words and observing the reaction that emerges between their magnetic fields. 

There are no bad people and no good people 

Some are more bad and some are less bad 

Some are more good and some are less good 

Some may be worse and better at once 

The poet, on two endlessly diverging paths, 

Walks both at one time 

Between flows a river 

It flows and flows 

Could all its waters ever be told? 

How far does it stretch on?

Now I write a draft. I keep on writing for as long as I can, until I’m completely drained. My drafts are usually long. Very long. It’s difficult to control a long poem. It’s hard to see it all at once. Once I have a draft, the first thing I do is erase. Thoughts can’t help but follow the tight weave of cause and effect. To create empty space requires adjustments after the fact. When I wrote A Possible World, I delved deeply into this, working with the precision of an entomologist preparing a specimen. I wanted everything to be spoken through the image, so I poured huge amounts of time into heightening image clarity. I was afraid that if the speaker gave expression to anything directly, the poem would move too much through affect. Before I debuted, I was often told that my poetry was too sentimental. That phrase was a chain around my ankle. I worried over how to become drier. It felt as if, when I was hurting, I should never say it hurt. If I cried, I shouldn’t mention tears. I kept hearing the voice of someone telling me that’s not poetry, that’s a diary. They were right, but also they were wrong. 

Poetry is made in revision. This is not an exaggeration. Without revision, poetry is nothing more than gathered fragments of image and thought. After my first collection, when I was writing Feeling Helped, I wanted to try something different. I wanted to cough up the voice I’d been pressing down. I was sick of always speaking through the stopover of the image. It felt like the voice of the weak, like I was always hiding behind images. The idea that some things are ineffable felt like a worldview centered on the wound. As if we must hide our wounds and be ashamed of them. I wanted to lay it all bare. I wanted to throw off the cardigan always draped over the scars and reveal the bare skin to the sun. I suppose that’s why Feeling Helped became a collection so full of direct voices. 

It’s also why that collection is so loud. I like it for being loud. Sometimes it feels good to put up with a little commotion. 

If I say bird, I hope you’ll hear bird 

If I say red, I hope you’ll think of red, 

Not pull from bird wings, glide, soar 

Not make from red blood, pathos, heat 

In bird’s place, bird 

In red’s place, red

Once I’ve erased everything I can erase, I rearrange. I arrange each word and sentence so that they may find their place, in the appropriate spot. Of course, this too I do by feeling. I’ll want to put the knife in the kitchen and the soap in the bathroom. Whenever that happens, I wander around, trying out this place or that—the knife in the vestibule, the soap on the railing. I’m not doing this any which way, but according to some rule or standard that’s personal to me. I’ve never tried to put it into language, but if I did, it might go something like this. 

In the first place, it’s similar to installation art. It’s good to move according to some rule, but not one easily ascertainable or obvious to the eye. The standard for the whole flow is whether something feels natural or not. Even the unnatural is ultimately based on the natural. Anything wholly unnatural feels artificial. Some abruption must once in a while break in among the naturalnesses to appear fresh, to draw the eye. Each thing must be distant enough for its presence and form to shine. Each piece of language, too, needs its own space. Sometimes I intentionally set things to disarray by tacking on an overlapping piece of language. In that case, I’m putting forth not the individual word but the effect given by the intersection of these language bundles. Maybe this could be seen as part of my desperate fondness for repetition. The repeated word or phrase attains inevitability through its repetition, so there must be a reason for its selection, but more than the word itself, it’s the effect of the repetition that I’m after. 

I like heavy metal. Sometimes I feel it’s colder and closer to silence than more peaceful, calming music. When I want to create an exceptionally quiet moment within a poem, it feels more like trying to make the poem so loud it might explode. In simple terms, a poem traverses three paths—what I meant to write, what I did write, and what others read. In the past, I think many of my poems were trying to bring what the reader read as close as possible to what I intended to write. Not anymore. I enjoy the gap between what I meant to write and what I actually wrote. The rift between the planned and the actual is captivating, and I feel lucky to watch the transformation. I also try hard not to think about what will be conveyed to someone else. If I start considering what others might expect of me, I feel like I should write to meet those expectations. That desire seems like poison to poetry, so it scares me. I always want to write like a total punk, any way I very well please. I tell myself people are going to read it however they want, and I practice letting go of my jitters. 

Poets are always doubting the reader. We want everything to come through intact. We want to convey feelings uninjured. We worry the reader won’t understand the poem, and we find ourselves explaining. Like drunk people repeating ourselves ad nauseum. It’s because we’re desperate to be understood. But if you get like that, people don’t listen. They click their tongues and think, that’s the same thing they said last time they were drunk. That’s why it’s better to either put all your faith in the reader or imagine no one will read your poems at all. 

I think the best way is to imagine someone very close to you reading the poem. If no one comes to mind, it’s better to be chill about it and think that anyone could read it, however they want, or not at all. But this isn’t really chill. It’s try-hard. It’s fake chill. Still, it’s better to try. If you let yourself get wrapped up in the outside, you lose yourself. You become empty, a mere reaction to the demands and expectations of others. That’s never a good look.

People usually react in one of two ways when they read a poem they can’t understand. It’s either the difficult work of a genius, or just a bad poem. This is because they’re constantly looking for meaning. But what’s interesting is that some people locate the problem within, while others find it without. Sometimes, when I don’t get a poem, I start to worry. Am I too old? What if I just don’t get it anymore? Then I get angry. It feels like the poem is a mirror. This makes me think that poetry belongs to the realm of intuition, not understanding. That trying so hard to understand is the tragedy of being human. Or the blessing. 

Since the day the tree sprouted from my head 

Have I been soil? 

Ten millennia passed stewing stone 

Swallowing stone 

Was it seed? 

In the mirror, sweet bell pepper 

Infinite sweet bell pepper 

After erasing and erasing, arranging and rearranging, I start to fill out the poem. I shore up anything that feels like it’s missing something. Sometimes, parts I erased make a comeback. It makes me wonder why I erased them in the first place, but there are light years of difference between a final product that’s been through the full process and one that hasn’t. At least, that’s how I think of it. Sometimes the result of all the time spent repetitively writing and erasing, writing and erasing, is no different from having done nothing at all—when you erase the poem in its entirety, or simply make your way back to the very first draft. But in the process, the poet experiences, feels, and wavers. You learn things you wouldn’t have otherwise. I think that’s why poetry is such a strange and bittersweet genre. And what do I do after I fill out the poem? I erase again, I rearrange, and I fill it out once more. I repeat the three tasks over and over until I feel satisfied. It’s all about the feeling. I can never be completely satisfied, but eventually I find myself thinking, this is enough. That momentary fulfillment is like nothing else I’ve ever felt.

I’ve often been asked how I write long poems. I hope this essay offers an answer to that question. It has also helped me to realize once again how much I love poetry. Sincerely. To me, all the best hurt arises out of poetry. 

All my light went out. 

When we can illuminate nothing 

We grow harder. 

It means I can 

Not know 

All that I don’t know 

Just as well as I know what I do.

The revolving door turns inside the apple, 

And now my day will begin.