I did try to write stories in college because I was interested in writing, and I was interested in the sound of language, but I was just no good at narrative and at fiction.
Write
You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lines. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I’ll rise.
All I write about is what’s happened to me and to people I know, and the better I know them, the more likely they are to be written about.
When you begin to write poems because you love language, because you love poetry. Something happens that makes you write poems. And the writing of poems is incredibly pleasurable and addictive.
Jazz is very important. It’s not something I can put my finger on. When I’m writing at my favorite time, I like to have the gentle side of Coltrane or Brubeck on the CD player. It creates sort of a spiritual space in which I write best.
Sometimes you have a poem that you really want to write and it never happens.
In anything you write – in a short story, a poem – there has to be a counter-motion; it can’t go all in one direction.
Despite outsiders being invited to write software, the iPhone thus remains tightly tethered to its vendor – the way that the Kindle is controlled by Amazon.
I’ve always wanted to write poems and nothing else.
We are already so many things by the time we reach the middle of life that it is possible to see that really anything can happen, and that, by extension, anything is doable. I decided I’d write ‘The Calling’ as someone else. Another writer entirely, a fictional one who would be played by me.