All of these are true, even when they knock against each other:
I write because I must. This is not obsessive. It is not compulsive. It is necessary.
I write because I must keep moving.
I write because I am trying to see.
I write because it helps me explain things to myself. If I do not write, I cannot discover what I think. Without writing, the days pass in successions of dazzle and shade and fog, a tangle of impressions.
I must write clearly: whatever I think I understand has to be made plain to another reader bumping into my site and reading an essay or listening to or reading one of my poems.
I told my students that clarity was their baby, their momma, their sweet thang. So it is with me.
Writing makes me reach beyond what is in my head and out to others whom I do not know. I imagine someone else reading what I have written and that gives me pleasure. I exist, I guess.
Writing tries to keep me honest. I am compelled to ask if what I have written is pompous, a deflection, convoluted, a cliche, obscure, a lie, or whether its sound is off, its rhythm is wrong, whether a word has been poorly chosen, or whether all of it is a botch and must be trashed.
I write because I’m playing catch-up. I taught writing for 36 years and never had time to do my own. Now it pours out of me.
I write hoping to have a book of poems published. I am pretty sure that will not happen.
I write in pursuit of the dream that my talent will rise up. I am pretty sure that cannot happen.
I write to get better at writing. I think that has happened.
I write essays that either make arguments or tell stories: one, because my mind had been trained to logic since a child and the other because my father’s gift has come down to me (and my brother). Stories are the ligaments that fasten us to others.
I write poems because they do not fit into stories or arguments, and because they describe but do not explicate. They present the image that encloses the mystery I am attempting to feel.
Writing makes the past real and my life real and the sliver of the world through which I pass.
I live in the world. Writing helps make it last. For that time when another is reading what I have put together, I am something more than mist.
