"I know my curiosity as a writer and as a person makes me really interested in moving to parts of the..." — Tracy K. Smith

I love the sense of looking at the sad, paltry, and yet very familiar spectacle that we must make from moment to moment in our lives, and in our frenzy, as something that's as out there as alien life.

Lately, I've been thinking about the difference between poetry and prose, and as I've experienced it, poetry is insistent. It allows for images and statements to operate in a single space and resonate powerfully without the application to be elaborated upon and narrated.

Poetry is not the language we live in. It's not the language of our day-to-day errand-running and obligation-fulfilling, not the language with which we are asked to justify ourselves to the outside world. It certainly isn't the language to which commercial value has been assigned.

I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by - the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment on a given day without even having chosen to.