poetry

What are your left-hand pages—the pages you avoid, rescind, or altogether abandon? What nascent knowledge exists there? What would it mean to etch these pages into some kind of existence? What does it mean to turn and return to an idea and what accumulates in the act of turning?

Poetry, rather than reason or logic, seems to follow more closely the unregulated movement of a wandering mind.

Modern and contemporary poetry, certainly from Gertrude Stein on, embraced this kind of linguistic fracture, that centers less on a singular meaning than a multiplicity of connections.

Like a dream, a poem is an other-space where imagination is unbound. Like a question, a poem supposes uncertainty. Some dreams, and perhaps some poems, inspire us to act. In Muse & Drudge , I wrote, “I dream a world / and then what.”

Harryette Mullen: Dreams, poems, and questions are opportunities to look for meaning. I wanted to begin this book with questions rather than declarations.