I feel because I am never in my comfort zone I have an advantage.

Mimesis has longevity on its side. But Oasis wrote two of the greatest pop songs of all time, each with lyrics that mean less and less the more you think about them. So I'm going to have to go with the Gallagher brothers.

I think it is our job as poets to refuse the terms that society so often sets for usefulness. That, for instance, is what Dickinson did: she refused to be a wife, a homemaker, a standard member of her community. She knew she had to in order to have the space and time to write her poems. Thank god she said no!

It's a kind of de-familiarization in relation to the song: if she were to sing absolutely straight, right on the beat, because of the richness and intensity of her instrument - her voice - I think it could actually feel a little inhuman, too good somehow, separate from our concerns.

That choice to be ready to reject all other purposes, in favor of the possibilities of language freed from utility, is when the writer becomes a poet.

That is a horrible thing in a way, but it is the one thing poets can bring back to experience, this intense focus on language, which activates words as a portal back into experience. It's a mysterious process that's very hard to articulate, because it's focused entirely on the material of language in a way, but in the interests not just of language itself whatever that would mean - that's the mistake, by the way, that so many so-called "experimental" poets make - but in service to human experience.

That name, SUN BEAR, just sounds like an ideogram to me. Super resonant. By the way, this all might be related to Tomaž Šalamun's famous line, "Every true poet is a monster." Or why Richard Hugo writes that the imagination is a cynic. T