Denying fame, or incarnation as a public figure, does not necessitate abandoning pose.
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.
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.
To be a poet in the Anthropocene means trying to incorporate the structures we use in poetry or the kinds of imaginative, weirdo thinking we enact into our other modes of coping and relating.
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.
And maybe that brings us to the myth of chronology: linear time equals progression. No. There is no linear progression and we’re reproducing subjection again and again.
As long as you have things to say, you don’t have to package or repackage things in a very intellectual way. If the thought is forceful enough, it will find a way to convey itself, even if it’s in a broken language, even in broken English.
I guess it is labeled as a story collection. So they’re all—for the sake of categorization—they’re short stories, but I don’t know. Some of them were published as prose poems, and I think that letting them both be categorized and also evasive of categorization is kind of cool.
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.
In reading my work, you may have already eaten an entire fishing village and a boatful of suicidal aches. I used to stare at the ceiling a lot and it used to be my primary mode of creativity.
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.
It's not like you're going to convince decision-makers and they're going to make the right decision for you. It really is a question of forces, not men, which is the sort of line I hammer on throughout the whole book. Which means our response to it needs to be about forces, not men.