Abstract:
All art is religious in that it attempts to draw connections between seen and unseen, known and unknown worlds. In my view, religion is a kind of suspicion; the sum of our suspicions that perhaps what we see is not all there is. By extension, poetic aesthetics can also be so described. One suspects that, if words can express the ineffable, perhaps the craft of creating that expression is best guided by some set of prescribed rules or learned techniques. The artist's choice ought not be arbitrary, but made according to the relative persuasiveness of the rule or technique in question. My desire to write poetry springs in part from my belief that writing is an act which helps one to awaken from the unconsciousness into which we are all born. I believe that facility in language is a producer of consciousness; I believe that the study of poetry is a producer of that facility. Like I. A. Richards, I believe that words are "the occasion and the means of that growth which is the mind's endless endeavor to order itself." Believing that writing is an intensely conscious act, I am continually trying to focus my consciousness and shake myself out of sleep; my poetry is the occasion and the means of that growth.
