I hate poems with meaning, with causes, with ideas. I am one of those poets who believe poetry should communicate as directly as an unexpected kiss. If someone were to ask me to describe my poetry, especially this collection, I would say it is very close to the stories you might hear from a friendly but somewhat peculiar neighbor. A neighbor who always seems to be talking about two things at once but you’re not quite sure what. That not quite sure what is the poem, of course: The world beneath the world. Which is where I want to bring you.
I love everyday speech and I love the poetry it creates. It is a speech we sometimes declare unfit for poetry, but that is a horrible mistake. Our everyday speech is reflexively spun out of the deepest levels of our being. We never really think that much about the stories we’re about to tell, or how we’re going to tell them, unless we’re intent on deception. Our ordinary, gossipy stories are, in many senses, our truest signatures.
Compared to other, more fabricated fashions of speech that come and go with the times, everyday speech has a very long pedigree, right back to the emergence of human consciousness if you want to know the truth. It has a warp and woof that has been forged over millennia. We simply add our little fillip to it every time we open our mouths. And when we allow the Muse to further charge it with the soul’s authority, that self-same speech can wend its simple unpredictable way to the deepest part of our being and suddenly unseat us like nothing else in this world. Which, after all, is what poetry is all about, isn’t it?