The moment is a fish and the poet a hook. Like the time I walked into the bathroom to brush my teeth and my daughter was in the bathtub washing her hair.

I think poets breathe the air of the poets alive around them as well as those that have come before. It’s inevitable that a poet’s pieces are filled with echoes of other poets, obvious or subtle.

But if I tried to read poems at breakfast, I would probably become the egg. The lake would stand up and chase me down the street. I can barely stand music while reading poetry too because poetry is not still but very quiet. A room rearranging itself with every step you take. Stanza, door, sinking floors? No

Poetry to me is a genre of community. With the work we do at Rahila’s Ghost Press I have been privileged to meet so many incredible writers with their own unique voices and sense of story-telling.

Someone who does not simply tell us about something, but sits beside us in the silence that follows— breathing, alive. This is what... early, beloved poems did for me.

My paternal grandmother was a writer, poet, and elementary school teacher in my family’s ancestral hometown, Anju, Jining. She taught her students how to read words by the jujube trees she helped to plant at the entrance of their elementary school yard.

Read, love, listen, write, dance and sing – cry out – make waves – stand your ground firmly – experience big – be brave – be vulnerable – know who you are – give back before you take – and remember

The measure of these geolinguistic spaces is found in the particularity that writing reveals: correspondences of a world. And then, of course, the surprising and unexpected holes in that world.

Jan Zwicky is the author of over twenty books of poetry and prose including Forge, Songs for Relinquishing the Earth, and Wisdom & Metaphor. As both poet and philosopher, she frequently focuses on music, the natural world, and questions of ecology.