I've spent a lifetime writing: a diary I've kept everyday since January 1965, books, poetry, book reviews, criticism, and correspondence. Why did I do so much writing? On one hand, I enjoy solitude and being creative. On the other hand, there were things that happened in my life that I understood better in the act of writing; writing helped me to understand something about life and expressing this in a poem was both to discover something new and to have a numinous experience.
This writing I am talking about has to be fearless, the writer is going to a place that is marked with signs saying "No Trespassing", "Do Not Enter", and "Enter at Your Own Risk". The important things in life are not easy and they aren’t free, they are a lot of work. You may be afraid to write something down, or afraid to follow where your thinking is going, you may be inclined to censor your writing; just remember that no one else need ever read what you are writing, you can tear it up after you've written whatever you want to say, but you need to have courage and be fearless to do the writing. How could it be otherwise? Writing has to be a precise expression of what the soul has to say, what the soul perceives; this is more difficult than you might think.
What I am saying will mean very little to most people, but this is not meant for most people, it is meant for poets. A poet wants to write an authentic poem, a poem that is authentic to what the poet wants to say, to be true to the poet's inner being, and this requires years of writing and rewriting poems. All of a poet's work can be seen as one long poem, it is the poem of one's life, continuous and unbroken. You don't just sit down one day and write something you call a poem and think that makes you a poet, there is a lot more to it than this.
Writing poetry is not an obsession or even a compulsion, it is that there is no alternative but to do the writing that presents itself to you; it is what one does and to do anything else is to deny the Call to do this work; if you deny the Call you have betrayed your life, betrayed your mission in life. Not even God is as important as your soul, you can live very nicely without God but if you betray your soul you will have no life at all, just confusion and denial. Don't worry, God will forgive you for not believing in Him, He doesn't need your belief, He doesn't even need you. To see life, the particulars of life, and to express them, is to communicate things of the soul and poetry is the voice of the soul. Writing is always a movement in the direction of wholeness and understanding, of creativity, of making something new. It is a triumph of formulating and expressing in an exact way the thing you want to write, it is the achievement of wholeness over division. So, at the basis of writing is finding wholeness, truth, and Oneness with life. That's how important writing is to a poet and why poets need to be fearless when writing poems.
