wise words from jack

*i felt it only appropriate that the first post on here was from an old email jack sent out to encourage his students... a reminder of why when it's all said and done, and we've moved on to the next phases of our lives and spread out across the globe, somehow we can still all "be" together. -ktb*

"When we start out writing poems, it is new--everything is new. We begin to see the world differently, we even get pretty lyrical about stuff. We get excited to know that a line break can matter in a poem and that we can actually make that happen. It's like most anything good that we discover, full of fresh, new things.
And then we start "working" on our poems. We start "thinking" about them.
And we start feeling more uncertainty and frustration and even lose for a time that original excitement, that infatuation actually. Sometimes we even start screaming, "I CAN'T WRITE POETRY ANYMORE!!!!" Some of you may be feeling that now a bit or a lot. It's a transition...

If I never write another effective one, this way of being in the world is something I'll always have--and so will you. You are learning not only more about all that can be done with a poem, but also how to be with others' poems...

Poetry is not a course, not a subject, not a discipline. It's a way of being in the world." -jack ridl, 1/27/2004