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The Poem as Balm

To me the poem is a testing place for delight. So the result of writing may seem the result of a stochastic process. Where is the sense? I trust that the mind can discover its own sense just as it can create it. The task of my writing (right now and in the recent past; it may be something else in the future) is to discover the blissful point of the language. Too much delight and you get a riddle; too little and you get philosophy. The tools are dead ends, bits and pieces, fragments. So I keep a supply of raw materials in journals, on the phone, in loose paper squares. A poem lacking surprise cannot possibly be exciting. Surprise is the apprehension of novelty. Without novelty a poem is simply redundant—its essence can be discovered elsewhere. There's a lot of trust required in the test. You have to trust that the language can be transparent to any willful application of the understanding.

Meaning is mostly a secondary concern, if a concern at all. Things like grant proposals and budget analyses—the materials of my daily work life—carry with them intentional meaning: dreadful, lifeless things that kill off delight. They exercise only the brain and not the heart or the spirit. The poem, if it's anything at all, is a balm. To come at its creation thinking that meaning must also accompany the act is criminal to me, and the results are often as lifeless as its cousins in the business place. I try to let the reader construct the meaning, and so construct her own place of delight. Is the act of creating a poem just chiromancy then? Maybe. And so what? There are too many science experiments, too many logical arguments already.