I find labels like “spiritual but not religious” fall short for me. It’s a label that misses the tension behind this relationship to faith, doubt, and questioning the institution.
Poetry is, or should be, a kind of thinking; it’s nothingness’s kingdom, where everything is possible. I use poetry to find out what I think.
There is no arrival. All arrivals are departures.
Jean is a novel about disappearance without anyone actually disappearing.
The wonderful thing about writing about writing is how you peel off layer after layer to better understand not only your own aesthetic, but how that aesthetic is part of your soul, part of the way you approach life. An aesthetic is a type of lens you see the world through.
And there’s manufactured insecurity, which is the kind of insecurity that facilitates the concentration of power and profit, the kind of insecurity imposed on us by our economic and political system.
As a poet living in the world where we’re all currently living—especially as someone coming from a marginalized community—I often find myself drawn toward reading and writing poems that deal with the tragic, with the suffering I’ve endured and seen, and do so with some degree of cynicism and/or anger.
"But again, I did not succeed at destroying capitalism with my crown of sonnets. Language alone of course cannot rid us of our conditions. Is that very pessimistic?"
Melchor would send photos of maps and streets and sometimes even drawings to help me visualize something in order to then set it down in English correctly. I run a lot of the phrases by her, and she reads the finished draft.
Mike DeCapite’s Jacket Weather is the story of a man in his fifties rekindling a relationship with June, a woman with whom he reveled in New York’s thriving punk scene as a youth.
This never really happens, but I wanted it to be a book that anybody could read, more or less, because I got so many ideas for stories from people I worked with—when I worked on farms or in light construction, or growing up working at a pizza place. I always write and read in the morning, and when I worked on the farms or in construction, I would try to do a little bit before work since I knew the day was going to be tiring.
The people who run the art world are aware that if a true and great artist were to be recognized during their lifetime, they would have immense power. So the artists who are promoted are the lap dogs, the ones they can control.