Writing a Way

Utagawa Hiroshige, Evening Cherry Blossoms at Mt. Goten

Form is an attempt to transpose space into language.

Much of what we call style is determined by a poet’s relationship with silence. 

An inflexible style is a personal design against anxiety.

Poetry helps us not be subject to a single language model.

What I want is to fashion a syntax as complex as the modalities of thought. I suspect this syntax will have to involve much more than words. 

At least part of why I began writing was as an attempt to revise memory.

If the definition of a subject must necessarily be limited and arbitrary, the two technologies I know to most fully approximate a subject are: a philosophical genealogy, and poetry.

Critiques of my work don’t worry me. What worries me is when people don’t critique my work.

Your most inspired works may come from considering the works or ways of writing your favorite writers never wrote.

The prose poem is a form of ambivalence only because it's never been fully accepted as a legitimate form of literature.

I often think of vowels as a means to convey mood. The consonants around the vowels determine the strength of the tone. If writing was painting, the vowels would be the colors, the consonants the force of the brushstroke. 

It may be that all works of fiction are escapist. What differentiates some fiction, and makes it literature, is that it offers us something to take with us when we return from our escape. Other fiction only offers the escape. 

One of the most interesting things about being part of a writer’s group is not only seeing the styles of the other poets but seeing, over time, their obsessions as writers, and how through their style they express those obsessions. 

I want to write a poetry in which the speaker exists as a listener. A being closer to a receptive object rather than an active subject.

Notating your deletions gives marks their loss, of the unrecoverable. 

One of the characteristics that distinguishes writers of modernity is that they are asked to write not just about memories, but how they remember them, and to interrogate the nature of memory itself. 

Even when words are read silently, they still function as artifacts of the body. 

When you can’t figure out how to end a poem, refer the ending back to the beginning. 

When you find you have unintentionally written an inherited form, this indicates that you have internalized that form.

Writers who have an expertise in something other than writing are at an advantage to writers who do not. They can bring that expertise to their writing, and let it inform their practice. 

Let the poet decide what constitutes poetry.

Utagawa Hiroshige, Iwakuni Kintai Bridge