The Why of Poetry

May 9, 2025

I sat looking at the faces that had been meeting mine for the past four Saturdays....

In a Divinatory Poetics session, we read together—the poetry of masters, the masterworks of artists who have perfected their craft. We read them slowly—silently, and then aloud. Each individual voice, with its unique cadence and tone, feels its way through the metaphors and imagery, the fields of emotional color.

Then we write; without censorship or second thought, (as much as possible). And finally, we converse, wedding our voices with the language that inspired them. It’s an imaginal journey—and the landscapes we invoke together are so rich they often give me chills.

Real or Imaginary?

January 25, 2019

As a child, like most children, I was not much interested in designating the differences between ‘real’ and ‘not real’, (not to mention that much of what was considered ‘real’ by the adults around me seemed positively distasteful). I longed to know, to validate and discover, to make real and to follow the beauty, mystery, and luminosity that emerged unexpectedly in glimpses, at moments when the motivation to avoid punishment receded or the teacher looked away. This longing did not loosen its grip on me.

EnFolding Research

December 6, 2018

About a mile and a half down the path from my attic rooms, (home since March) is Grey Matter Books, a maze of a used bookstore. I am feeling for threads, listening for the emergence of the voices that will guide fresh work, as winter descends upon the aftermath of my frenzied graduate studies.

The art section that I thought I was headed for is two rooms deep past multiple corridors of books, but I barely get past the register today.

Divinatory Poetics

August 22, 2018

Not knowing, waiting and finding — though they may happen accidentally, aren’t accidents. They involve work and research. Not knowing isn’t ignorance. (Fear springs from ignorance.) Not knowing is a permissive and rigorous willingness to trust, leaving knowing in suspension, trusting in possibility without result, regarding as possible all manner of response. The responsibility of the artist […] is the practice of recognizing.
~Ann Hamilton

Divinatory Poetics describes a particular approach to composition: the cultivation of attention, entering in to a sort of lucid trance, experimentation with modes of thinking and angles of perspective.

THOUGHTS. WRITINGS. DETRITUS.