Agency,

on not giving over the self.

I’m not sure how to begin other than with first, gratitude. Thanks for reading, and subscribing.

There’s plenty about the now (which I’ll leave unsaid) generating a chronic sense of stress in the body. As a poet, perhaps I should say as a person, the chronic stress generates an armor.

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar’s work & research contends that this armored feeling is primal, a kind of instinctual resolve— but also a kind of response that leaves one unable to access fluid emotions.

There’s no margin to access the deeper when trudging through sludge.

“A book must be an axe for the frozen sea inside us” so writes Kafka.

…I think not just the reading of a book, but its writing. Not just the poems published, but the poems, we poets send out to be read…

One of the hidden mysteries of reading for a literary journal, is in identifying the fuel for the creative spirit— the generative fortitude a collective group of people access in order to send work out (most of the time for rejection).

What is that unnameable hope that brings forth the poems, the stories, the letters, the books?

That hope I believe is agency. A will that can bring us up from immobilized to mobile.

If you don’t know where to start, start with writing—