Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems. In these walks, they take on a symbolic life apart from their irritating, undeniable, interruptive presence. I figure them differently.

Rather, the collapsing between act and condition, "I am" with "I do," feels like authenticity, an authenticity of being. The muse rewarded me for a few months, after April of 2012, by giving me poems, almost a poem each day, that I can claim as coming from my writer's status.

I don't know where to place my body. Everyone notices that about me. I'm very restless.

I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.

Saul Bellow has that character in Henderson the Rain King say: "I want, I want, I want!"9 I remember reading this passage years ago and thinking, yes, that's the human.

Note, the reply will not be "I write," an act that I have, after all, been performing since I was nine.

I came to realize this weird projection: you are much more passionate about hating something outside of you when you know that something is also in you.