Creativity itself is a joyous unlatching. The act of creative imagining, inventing, saying differently, crafting a metaphor or image, then crafting another metaphor or image when you go further or when you revise - all these take whatever you think "is" and make clear that other possibilities exist as well. The sense of possibility, the amplitude and freedom that sense of malleability brings - for me, that cannot help but be joyous.

I don't have a cell phone (though for years I've kept saying, "soon").

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

If truth is the lure, humans are fishes.

How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.

Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.

Sam Hamill is a writer unabashedly taking his place within the community of literature and the community of all sentient beings-his fidelity is to the magnificent truth of existence, and to its commensurate singing.