The poetry I love best has no illusions about its limits, brings us to the furthest threshold of what’s possible in language, then lets us go. This kind of poetry is maybe not exactly expressing the inexpressible, but it does bring us to awareness of the inexpressible.

There is the technical aspect, of course, having fun with words and seeing how ingenious you can be with a line break or a metaphor. And then there's the moment when you realize what the poem does, what histories and knowledge it shares, and what futures it imagines.

A poem is a capsule—simultaneously a record of a moment and a gesture to forever. A poem is a way to work through, or toward, something.

Thick hardcover bindings in forest green, red, or blue, held issues dated decades ago. Recent issues sat on metal shelves facing the opening. Every page harboured a different story, a different promise. It was within this space that I felt the most homely.

Hologrammatic, poems are sourced in memory, speech, and books. They draw upon language held in commons and attend to folk and pop culture. Poems elaborate, borrow, and recycle.

but for me in writing the mysteries of my inner world are illuminated much like the mechanics of dreaming. I strive to balance the many conflicting elements of a poem and what I think to be true. My poetic both implores and declares: Let us understand

Against extractive conceit—in poetry, I hone my refusal of apathy, provincialism, inferiority, and fragility. May I always tow lines attuned to old and new music.

I'm an exophonic author writing poetry in two languages: one that I was born into, and the other that I migrated into. My work is a display of two languages, English and Persian, that are not semantically in conversation with each other.

I imagine my poetics is a box of curiosities: an unusual rock, a railway spike, a cat’s eye given by an older sibling, some old coins, one stamped with my birthyear. Objects I dig out every now and then, reorder, shuffle around. Here’s a few items currently in the mix. Attentiveness.

The insight for me, in the years writing Ghosthawk, was that the inner field of my imagination, my mind, was continuous with the field of wildflowers and the star fields. It’s an old insight; it’s nothing special, but it had a profound impact on me nonetheless. All the world in a grain of sand stuff.

I write a haptic poetry in which the touch of other writing is continually felt, such that the encounter with my book is also an encounter with the books I have been reading.

When reading …, I enter a state of not-knowing which frees the imagination: poems come on through, then, through a kind of portal, door to a gate, unlocked—so the poems: themselves, the thing.

Whenever I’m pressed for a definition of the word lyric, I think first of this—the ‘song’ contained in the Greek word ode, the Latin carmen, the Hebrew psalm, the Sanskrit gita, and the French cantique. Or the ‘little sound’ of the Italian sonetto; the rhythmic ‘jumping’ or ‘dancing’ behind the French ballade.

It’s inevitable that landscape seeps into writing, whether we are writing from an urban, a rural, or a wild place. And there are many kinds of landscape—the physical, the aural, the psychological and the social, just to name a few.

As a daddy writer to be, I urge every parent to be able to write about their experiences and share it with the world.