Be planetary

“At this moment in our culture, where there is so much cliché and so many soundbites, and where our writing is corrected even as we’re making a sentence by a computer that’s using algorithms to move us toward the most conventional possibilities and sentence formation, and where our lexicon is also being diminished by the spaces we have to write in, like how many characters in a tweet, one of the things poetry offers is a more expansive repertoire of language for the expression of the nuances of our feelings and thinking.”

“(…) ask myself often: What story am I telling—both to myself and to the world? Most of the time, it runs just beneath overt awareness, like the ambient sound in a hotel lobby, a soft murmur, a water feature you stop hearing. Then one day, you catch it. You really listen. And you realize: this is what’s been playing on a loop. Now, I try to be responsible for the texture of my thinking. Not in pursuit of perfection, but as a daily practice—a quiet vow: to become, thought by thought, more hospitable to the invisible and less bound to the performance of a self I once believed others required. I’ve let go of the idea of a unified identity. What draws me now is something closer to cogency—not a fixed core, but a constellation of what I love: people, practices, questions. What gathers there, hums.”