“When we study a poem; we rewrite its intimacy with a space — the horizonless sky enclosed in
language capsules.”
~ Janice Lee, from ‘The Sky is not Blue’

How much of yourself can you contain within cadence; within syntax, within sorrow? The cosmos sustains itself through simplicity — through the creative ‘grammar of resistance’ that every artist brings to the brink of their own consciousness.

What restores us after rupture? What replenishes us after ruin? Is it complexity — or is it the friend’s hand that reaches for yours instinctively; without artifice, without even articulation: only love? Is it verbiage that cuts through the venom of existence; or is it the lace-edge of a leaf against your tear-stained cheek, the padded vulnerability of a cat’s paw, the silken-salt acoustics
of the sea?

Depth does not depend on dense convolutions — & neither does poetry. What lives in us is also what lives in language: longing; loss; loyalty, liberation. The shorelines that take shape on the basis of our breakages, the basalt-black textures of our tenderness that develop despite desolation, despite devastation, despite dereliction, despite, despite, despite — they do not shimmer through obfuscation. They shimmer through the barest of touches: ink or otherwise.
They shimmer through the subtle purity of a well-placed word: a single stroke of paint; a small coin of color. They shimmer because they simply are — not because they are trying to be.

The power of poetry is exactly that: dignity without need of definition. That which speaks to the silent child hearing the screams of a skeletal marriage at six in the morning, the teacher carving compassion from her ribs for children who choose cruelty despite being cherished, the writer who looked her own loneliness in the face & said: “I will listen to you, no matter the cost.”

My message to any kind of creator who may come across this, whether they may be a dancer, a sketch artist, a singer, a seamstress, a novelist, or anybody at all who shelters their imagination the way one would a bird with a broken wing; is only this: the first life that you will save with your craft: through your words, your body, your breath, your revolutionary refusal to let life swallow you whole: will be your own. The rest arrives later; if it has to, if it’s meant to — but your work &
your wildness & your will to walk through wave after wave: rests entirely on your resolution to remain yourself. To survive the things & individuals & indictments that you see & are sliced clean by — & to make meaning & myth & magic out of them anyway.

To every artist; in every sense of the word, reading this – I hope you never lose that inchoate, inveterate, intricate; innocence that allows you to examine the world with both weight & lightness. I hope you offer grace even to the ugly grudges of old ghosts — I hope you sail from suffering into silence & stillness that is more sacred than selfhood itself.

I hope you keep finding goodness; even in the grass growing over the graves — even though I cannot claim goodness for my own self. I cannot even claim wisdom — all I can claim is the knowledge that our wounds are our pathways into wonder: into poetry; into the practice & intimacy of writing through injury, injustice, injunction. The ability to transmute grief into grit is a creator’s greatest gift — & also his/her/their greatest responsibility.

In the words of Danez Smith (from his poem, ‘Bluff’),
“there is no poem greater than feeding someone there is no poem wiser than kindness
there is no poem more important than being good to children
there is no poem outside love’s violent potential for cruelty
there is no poem that ends grief but nurses it toward light.”

There are limits to language; yes, as there are limits to all things held by our hands, our hurts, our hideous yearning for the years to be gentler; for people to be softer; for life not to continually be a lesson in letting go — but there are no limits to love. And when our literature is in service to that love — to that secret spirit of untrammeled surrender & sovereignty that seeks to communicate in us all: there is precious little that poetry cannot do.