It was so fun conversing with Kara Johnstad on Om Times Radio in her wonderful show Voice Rising. She asked such insightful questions about how poetry might help us meet the world (and ourselves), and I loved the wide-angled lens she uses. We read poems from my latest book, Hush, and talked about daily life/poetry life, yesness, generosity, the gift of constraint, the dance of silence and voice, and the impossibility of writing a poem about ticks. Available here on spotify.
Here’s the first poem I shared:
Urgency
Again the urge
to bring gauze
to the broken world—
and medicine
and a plaster cast.
Again the urge
to fix things,
to heal them,
to make them right.
Again the chance
to do the work,
which is to look in,
to touch the pain
but not become it,
to see the world
exactly as it is
and still write it
a love letter,
to meet what is cracked
with clarity,
to mirror and grow
whatever beauty
we find.