To see and fail to speak from far
away of seeing, to go about
a life, to write to
friends and of them,
to begin within
their names, to wish them well
and end in yours, sincerely,
to drive to work
in a green car singing,
to have insurance, to listen
to the radio, the county
road in autumn,
the light collected
in the maples, in the birches,
beautiful, to mouth
the words of others,
to believe them,
to feel their language
is your own, to own them
momentarily, to feel ashamed
of owning, to stare
into the open
windows of your house,
to stand beside
your wife, in the center
of your yard, living,
breathing, in the middle
of October, the leaves
around you, everywhere
around you, to watch your daughter,
to listen to her laughter
fill you. From far away
across the yard, it fills you.
And then to know within the poem
the noise that other
people make
when suffering. Enough
to love them, to wish them well, you needed
them imagined. You made
them up, the people.
What are people?
And so it was you came
to speak alone, a soul composed
beyond the finite boundary
of an ethics. Etched
into an opening and closing
space, the sound of “it” compressed with “it is not,”
their echoing, your ache
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Black-and-white headshot of Arthur Sze
"A Conversation with Arthur Sze"

"I like to use the image of zen stones, as if somehow the poem is coming up from below the surface and emerging from the imagination. That takes a lot of time, so that’s a very different writing process than what I was doing early on. I make much more of a mess. I discard a lot more. I think, 'Water Calligraphy,' for example,  probably took me ten months to write. It’s a different kind of commitment to a poem."

via MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW
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Cover of Jillian Weise's book, The Amputee's Guide to Sex
What Sparks Poetry:
Dustin Pearson on Jillian Weise's "Beautiful Freak Show"

“Up until encountering Jillian’s poetry, I’d more or less repressed or compartmentalized the emotions I felt as a result of my marginalization and always ultimately unsuccessful assimilation, both for fear of how dangerous I thought it was to indulge those emotions and out of societally formed habit. I found a way to misplace, overlook, or normalize horrible things, even if I always survived them."
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