I was eleven the first time I wrote a poem. It had snowed, we were home from school and a bit of dialogue from a movie we were watching triggered an avalanche of words in my young mind. Led by some instinct I left the living room, went up to the room I shared with my brother, dug out paper and a pen, sat down and began to write.
Little has changed in the subsequent thirty years. The words like hyper butterflies or hummingbirds or fat, pollen drunk bumblebees batter around the confines of my head until one day or night they are ready, the door opens and they arrive in a timeless and thoughtful flurry. Each word arrives and guides the next, steers the shape of the page, now altered by poetry and, once complete, the words—the poem—live now only on the page, only when given breath by the attention of a reader.
I have heard Mary Oliver and Marie Howe both speak about the ways a poem lives within the reader: a prayer, a song or a mantra, repeatedly privately or publicly over the course of a life, becoming a part of oneself. Every experience of the poem individual, every experience shared, a myriad of meanings, a myriad of ways to exist in the world, each and every poem—each and every word. Each and every reader.