So, last blog I said I would this week reveal my writing plan for the future. First, regarding the future, Fate is in charge. What I intend, though, is this: I’m rejoining my tribe, poets, and now my mornings pages are full of old words and new insights. I’m mining for prompts two books, Tremor by Adam Zagajewski and The Notebook by José Saramago. The first is poetry, the second a collection of blog posts by a Nobel Prize winner from Portugal. I need their ideas, images, vocabulary and syntax now to be of use in a ragged world.They lead me deeper into dark and difficult places, but I manage to come out of those caves (think Plato) with sharper sight, or so it feels. Maybe I’ve mentioned a hundred times that I admire depth as well as the other joys of poetry.

Poetry should be of use, not to preach, but to connect the writer and the reader to a shared world. Ten years ago or so I took a weeklong workshop at Naropa University with poet Allison Hedge Coke. Her assignment was to put art in service to a cause. At that time my cause was our endangered food supply. I was fired up by the writing of Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, and others who highlighted the risks of taking food for granted. The result was my poetry book The Great Hunger, or in Irish An Gorta Mor. (No, I don’t speak Irish; a generous student in Galway once tried to teach me, but this short-stay visitor did not learn much Irish.)

Over coffee yesterday, I talked with Jared Smith, an excellent and experienced poet, about reconnecting to poets. He encouraged me and suggested what to read, where to go, who to know or know about. I’m also involved in writing News Poetry for Colorado Independent, a progressive online newspaper. And I have widened the lens of current events to include concerns over climate, homelessness, and racial inequality. The news is full of inhumanity and I don’t plan to preach–preaching is not the same as poetry–but I mean to put my words in service to the sad unfairness of the world and find some peace in the making of poems.