F O O T N O T E

A friend, who will soon publish his heartcracking memoir, told me I should write one of my own. My roommate raised her eyebrow and said, Then you'll really have to change your name.

Sylvia Plath said, For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.

But

Marie Howe said, He was 90 pounds, he was going to be dead in three days, and he held my hand and said: Maria, this is not a tragedy. She said, They're love poems; they're not grief poems.

Jack Gilbert said, How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,/and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,/God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words/get it all wrong. Lucille Clifton said, Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

Rainer Maria Rilke said, Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it.

Laure-Anne Bosselaar said, I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. She said also, I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at everyone.

Jane Kenyon said, The poet's job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it.

And Marie Howe said, I read poetry to stay alive.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.

P A R A D O X

"The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle.

Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being."

Quote by Madeleine L'Engle.
___________

Syntactically, this quote is difficult to swallow. Reread it a few times. Slowly. I promise when the hard shell melts and you reach the jelly center of its meaning, your life will change.

I'll stop with the awkward metaphor.

That paradox above is what I want to achieve through my poetry. The intense war and marriage of the "flesh" and the "spirit," which exist in every human being [whether you recognize it or suppress it]. According to this paradox of light's ability to be both a particle and a wave, if God does exist, [s]he relinquishes as much control as [s]he exerts it.

Can't God be both omnipotent and helpless? Can't we be both rational and spiritual?

I'm not here to convince you of anything. Not about poetry. Not about God. Not about my mangy, unpopular ideas of poetry and God. I'm mostly here to admit--in a world crammed with people trying to be gods--that I am a human being. And nothing more. Well... a very curious human being.

I sound psychotically metaphysical. Off my rocker.

And I'm going to cut the "[s]" bullshit when I attribute a pronoun to the God figure.

The point is, as a budding poet, I've decided to journey into the center of everything. The center of what it is that makes us beg. Bruise. Love. What it is that makes the most cynical, rational, realistic people pray. Because we've all prayed--whether you want to admit that or not. And for the other half of you, we've also all masturbated.

Hopefully, I will make more sense as I figure out what to brainwash you with here.

Welcome to my website. Please let me take your coat. I hope you enjoy your stay.