Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in.

The first poem I ever wrote, at least the earliest one on file, circa second grade.

“This language that is seen is a project that the poets and artists should take very seriously.” - Terence McKenna

---

There’s an old home movie somewhere, maybe in a landfill now, though I like to think that someone in my family still has it, of my Gram’s husband, Bob Duffy, a proud-chested blue-collar tradesman, with a parrot on his shoulder, a bottle of beer in hand, reciting Wendell Berry’s poem, “The Peace of Wild Things.” He knew it by heart, and so did Gram. I remember hearing them recite it when I was young, and not really recognizing that it was a poem, more a string of words that were important enough for them both to remember - an incantation. Poems were something else to me then, stuffy, metered, jibberish for some powdered, unsweating class I’d never meet, and didn’t care to. I didn’t recognize that the little things I’d been writing, like the one pictured above, those were poems, too.