Stories & Beer

I don’t know why I write when I do or why I’m silent. I don’t know why a poem begins in one place and ends up in another. I don’t know why there’s feeling today but tomorrow nothing. Perhaps some inferior god could explain all this.

Every poem is an attempt to capture the rise and fall of our chests as we lived through all of it.

I never have anything figured out, or know the ending in advance. This is one way prose writers are different from poets. My novelist friends outline everything and know where they’re going. But I have no outline. Sometimes, the poem takes on a life of its own, and I must yield to it, like a rider on a cantering pony.

What do we do now, now that we are happy?

I think people always expect artists to have a larger understanding of the issues they write about. People have looked to writers and artists forever and asked them to be cultural commentators or political commentators, which can be very scary because I can only speak to my own perspective, and I’m figuring this out along with everybody else. I’m not even sure I’m the best person to talk about it, whatever it is, but I’m someone who can and does.

Generally I tend to read a lot and fill myself up as constantly as possible—anything from other literature, to criticism, to Wikipedia articles on science and social phenomenon, to art. I very seldom start a project knowing what I want it to be. I start by stealing little bits of language—taking words from any source possible and combining them in nonsensical ways and then trying to make sense of those phrases, fixing those phrases up and piecing them together into something that resembles a narrative. Sometimes I might pick something I’ve read or thought about that feels exciting to me: taxidermy, the foster care system, bingo. It’s strange, but it works for me. I get bored if I’m not constantly surprised, so my way of getting out of my own head is by writing in a way that’s nearly outside of myself.