People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush … (Li-Young Lee)


I’m a rather private person who doesn’t much like talking about her personal life and history except where some episode or detail bears directly on the subject at hand. I’d much rather let the productions of my art speak for themselves – and for me – as a creative sublimation of the expressive impulse and life experiences in back of them. That said, however, I’d be remiss if I didn’t open this blog with at least a suggestion of what I’m about.

There is likely no single satisfactory way to define what poetry is or ought to be. The field is informed by such a complex history of practices and critical perspectives that one would do better to think in terms of poetries rather than “poetry” in general. Poetry is as poetry presents itself at a given time and clime – which is to say, as poets write it according to the dictates of their sensibilities and conscience. In my own case, what I value most in the medium is the opportunity it affords to stretch the resources of language beyond their usual capacities in order to point to what would otherwise remain outside their power to express. – A little like using a finger to point up at the ungraspable moon … In this wise, my poetic aspirations lean toward the inwardness of a gaze turned back on itself, cultivating a kind of double vision mediating between so-called “objectivity” and the subjective undercurrents feeding into conscious perception.

The poems I find myself writing are generally short and unabashedly lyric in intent, hearkening back to the manifold aesthetics of the old “deep image” poets combined with a feeling for organic form. My poetics could well be considered “retro,” then, from the standpoint of a lot of contemporary criticism, but those kinds of judgments – as interesting as they might be in their own province – remain outside the legitimate preserve of my creative process, where all that really matters is that the poems themselves are honestly delivered from that imaginal space where dreaming and intellection are in constant dialogue to make sense out of my astonishment at life. “Only truthful hands write true poems,” asserted Paul Celan. “I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem.” Neither can I …

I’ll wrap up this first post with a sample poem that happens to touch on my creative process. I wrote “Poeisis” back in early 2020 after encountering the following lines attributed to the celebrated Punjabi writer and poet Amrita Pritam (1919-2005):

There was a grief I smoked
in silence, like a cigarette –

Only a few poems fell
out of the ash I flicked from it …

This moment occurred just as the impact of the COVID pandemic was starting to be felt here in the U.S. The image of a woman smoking her grief in silence with poems falling from the ash struck a deeply resonant chord with how I was feeling at the time, inspiring me to take it a step further in a poem of my own:

POIESIS (after Pritam)

Like flakes of ash on white snow
These words gather
           falling
As of their own accord

Dreaming this poem to its contour
As I sit by
       going up in smoke

Like the clouds inside my coffee cup
A coronal bloom
          in the hollow of my throat

Where the heart
         letting go
Lapses beneath itself to fallow silence

Cupped in its solitude like a well
Floating its nebular traces

A poet’s lot, as Li-Young Lee declares in the epigraph opening this piece, is not merely to bear witness to the burning bush, but to find oneself sitting inside it. Pritam’s image of the poet “smoking” her grief suggests that she’s talking about some sort of emotional auto-immolation following the experience of a catastrophic loss. But being a poet, she’s also able speak of harvesting a few poems out of wreckage and desolation. – Only a few, as she takes pains to tell us, but I can’t help but suspect that they gave voice to something very powerful …

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