‎Sahib-e-Dil

“The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.”

Once I learned how to write at all, rather than merely floundering, I found that a poem can start virtually anywhere: with a fragment of overheard speech, a headline in the local newspaper, the sight of a child being carried on her father’s shoulders, a fragment of guilt I’ve tried for years to bury. Sometimes I long to capture something I’ve encountered in that gorgeous, ephemeral present-tense of the theater—the turn of an actor’s head, an ingenious use of stage prop, etc. And like so many writers, I find that photographs can be powerful incitements. For the most part, I try to hold off on the ‘about'  part for as long as I can. Attending to syntax and stanza form is one of the ways I try to do that. No one needs to hear me ruminate (or worse, hold forth) on something I already think I know. In one of her very early poems, Brenda Hillman wrote something like 'the jetty of my ignorance’ (I’m sure I’m getting that wrong: I seem to remember a walkway of some sort and a large body of water). Jetty, or footbridge, or causeway, the point is this: a certain kind of ignorance is good, even necessary, for the making of a poem. I’m not talking about willful mystification or atmospherics, God forbid, but rather about the momentum of good-faith wanting-to-discover-something. Deferring the 'about’ part is rather like deferring the main clause of a sentence: it stores up energy. All of us carry around enormous repositories of grief and longing and wonder and memory, and these will always make their way into poems. Frontal attack, I’ve found, is rarely the way to unlock them.

Once I learned how to write at all, rather than merely floundering, I found that a poem can start virtually anywhere: with a fragment of overheard speech, a headline in the local newspaper, the sight of a child being carried on her father’s shoulders, a fragment of guilt I’ve tried for years to bury. Sometimes I long to capture something I’ve encountered in that gorgeous, ephemeral present-tense of the theater—the turn of an actor’s head, an ingenious use of stage prop, etc. And like so many writers, I find that photographs can be powerful incitements. For the most part, I try to hold off on the ‘about'  part for as long as I can. Attending to syntax and stanza form is one of the ways I try to do that. No one needs to hear me ruminate (or worse, hold forth) on something I already think I know. In one of her very early poems, Brenda Hillman wrote something like 'the jetty of my ignorance’ (I’m sure I’m getting that wrong: I seem to remember a walkway of some sort and a large body of water). Jetty, or footbridge, or causeway, the point is this: a certain kind of ignorance is good, even necessary, for the making of a poem. I’m not talking about willful mystification or atmospherics, God forbid, but rather about the momentum of good-faith wanting-to-discover-something. Deferring the 'about’ part is rather like deferring the main clause of a sentence: it stores up energy. All of us carry around enormous repositories of grief and longing and wonder and memory, and these will always make their way into poems. Frontal attack, I’ve found, is rarely the way to unlock them.

“I have put my soul and trust in flowers. Occult flowers, flowers of premonition.”

“(…) people kiss and hold hands and fall in love and fuck and laugh and cry and hurt others and nurse broken hearts and start wars and pull sleeping children out of car seats and shout at each other. If you could harness that energy—that constant, roving hunger—you could do wonders with it. You could push the earth inch by inch through the cosmos until it collided heart-first with the sun.”

“ESTRAGON: Don’t touch me! Don’t question me! Don’t speak to me! Stay with me! VLADIMIR: Did I ever leave you? ESTRAGON: You let me go.”

[ID:

“All that exists is beautiful, error as much as truth.”

“The new person you become with that first sip of wine was already there. Look at Pentheus twirling around in a dress, so pleased with his girl-guise he’s almost in tears. Are we to believe this desire is new?”