Everything Here
Spoken in the voice of the poet, Wordsworth Lied is an ambitious poem that also assumes too much, not only as it attempts to give a new definition of poetry and what it entails, but as it introduces the reader into a commonplace definition of poetry given by William Wordsworth.
Very rarely, I’ll let a poem sit and return to it weeks or months later, but this is not really my process and doesn’t often work out well for me—to write a poem, I seem to need to be in that headspace that it was first conceived...
I write to sing, and for me, each line (by line I don’t just mean the typical line a line-break makes, but each line of a sentence fragmented by a punctuation mark) must be musically self-sufficient.
I should start by saying, I don’t think of it as ‘writing’ poetry as such, but more of ‘making.’ So the writing itself often comes out of me without too much suffering, but the making is quite an ordeal.
I like how with raw simplicity and directness, one sees how a 28-line poem covers over 500 years of history. One sees how poetry is the past, present and the future.
Words and ideas come to me easy enough, but because they come mute and tangled, I have to set them up in a cauldron, you know, and bid them speak...
