Poems, no matter how dark their subject matter, are always an affirmation of life.1. What can be seen in the dark no matter how dark it is? What light will we follow when it is most dark? It took me many years to know what is obvious to many people; the light that is always present, even in the darkness, is the goodness of life, it is love. That light is love.
1. Because the act of creating something is, in itself, an affirmation of life.
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Creativity has the capacity to heal; some have fallen into the darkness of existence, and writing poetry or making art is one way to find light in the darkness; what is the light? It is the discovery of love in one's life. It is greater than any darkness.
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3. You don’t become a poet expecting to be liked
for everything you write, or even for some of what you write. Why do people
become poets? It is simple: people become poets because they are called to this
work; writing poetry is an act of transcription, writing down what is given to
you and, most importantly, writing poetry is to feel that truth is so important
that it must be adhered to. This is why freedom of speech is so important; it
is essential if literature is to have any meaning or relevance for either the
poet or the reader.
4. Poetry isn't antiseptic, it's passion for life. Poetry is love and death and tears of joy and tears of sorrow. It's messy, it's stuff we don't want to talk about, it's betrayal and jealousy, it's love and sex and tenderness and grief and regret and awe and divine inspiration; it's the shadow falling across one's life. Poetry is nothing if not passionate; passion, not the intellect, not fashion, not popularity, not what other people are doing, defines poetry.
5. In The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry (2022), I described how one's life can be reconfigured to something totally different from what one expected in life; I described this as the Great Reconfiguration. When I was six years old and my father died my old life became redundant, everything changed; I was one person and then I became someone else. His death has preoccupied much of my life, his passing reconfigured my life; this began the relentless journey of grief and understanding, love and loss, that I've been on, and trying to understand this existence and expressing it in poems.
6. To write not parts of a life but a whole life, that is what I have tried to do; it is an impossible task and can be attempted only if one refers to archetypes and a mythological approach to experience as a way to communicate this information. The poet's body of work is all of a piece, a single entity; it's a life that is transformed by poetry, it's the soul speaking through the poet. For John Keats life was a vale of soul-making, not a vale of tears; this was always the direction of my writing, my concern has always been with soul-making and I expressed this in my poems.
