Re: Writing

When I was a child, writing was about expressing emotion without inhibition, which was helpful and therapeutic at the time. Now, in my poems, I aim to balance that same instinctual burst of language with careful craft and form. I try to write a bit every day, even if it's just a sentence in my journal or a line of poetry. I'd love to get into a Stafford-esque rhythm of writing a poem each morning, even if it's a crappy one that needs my attention later.

Writing, to me, seems to be largely a matter of practice, not always inspiration. As Joyce Carol Oates says, “In a sense, the writing will create the mood. If art is, as I believe it to be, a genuinely transcendental function–a means by which we rise out of limited, parochial states of mind–then it should not matter very much what states of mind or emotion we are in.”