This, in the end, might be the greatest social good of poetry: to get us to live differently, with a different sort of thinking and concentration, even if it's just for a few moments.

Always in search of the question that might make you ask me one in return

Somewhere back a whiskey or so ago I wrote that thinking was a real thing in the world, just like anything else. I mean that very literally, materially. And it's true about poems, too.

The question does arise if how and why to write poetry in this time. It feels both completely essential and also quite difficult. But that's how writing poetry has felt to me my whole life. Everything seems to have just gotten immensely more mortal and tragic and scary, which makes it hard to concentrate, but also, if harnessed, can provide immense energy for making poems.

It is absolutely vital to preserve a space where the mind, by means of poetic thinking, can move in a free, even anarchic, way. It must do so, in order to find deep truths that would not be otherwise available, ones that we desperately need. Anyone who writes poetry knows what I'm talking about, because they've had the experience of thinking this way.

When I saw the sun bears at the Oakland Zoo, I immediately was drawn to them. Not to be ornery, but regarding what you said about the speaker identifying with the bear: I'm not sure it's exactly right to say that the speaker feels that the bear must share his sadness, or whatever else he is feeling. That would be classic pathetic fallacy, which is certainly generative for poetry, but here the speaker appears actually to be rejecting that idea.

I don't know if anyone has ever mentioned this, we need to be careful with drugs! They're not just all fun and games! And of course poetry would be immeasurably worse without humor.