As Landscape

Poetry. I never set out to write a poem. I will jot things down in my notebook, sometimes ideational, sometimes not, sometimes picked up from the environment, or misheard, or from a dream, and occasionally a phrase will have a rhythmic urgency that compels me to jot something further, and then I’m lost in process and have no idea where I or the poem is going. This is a liminal state fraught with both joy and terror, and it is processual. The process may extend over a few or many lines and take a few moments or days and months. It lasts until one emerges at the other end, back into the everyday, arrival signaled by the loss of urgency–from the author’s Afterword.