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.

“Poetry, because it enacts the mutability of both language and perception, can reflect the constant mutability of our world. In the underground verbal webwork made by the roots of words…

This curious empathy leads to an emotion of form, but not without awkward pauses and stumbles, a slapstick which all the while suggests a particularity of duration, occasionally melody.

I’m thinking about sentences, I’m thinking about the prose poem, I’m thinking about friends and social concerns and civil rights and the ecological precipice; our small children go rushing past.