On Poetry

I have not written poetry for a long time. Maybe I have lost the person I was writing to, in my own brain, the one I was having that particular conversation with. Whoever it was, I knew him (or her) from the time I was six, and writing my first poems. It is a very immediate and truncated conversation. At one point I thought I found the person in the flesh, but it was only someone else who spoke the same language. I miss poetry. It is different from the novels, it is saying “I-now” rather than “she-then.” And there is a person, a consciousness I am speaking to, rather than creating a world, as in a novel, for someone to chance upon. (2003)