Kimberly Blaeser

So my process is, when I'm doing nature especially, is that I'm paying attention.

I always say poetry is an act of attention.

And so just looking closely, and especially at the intricate aspects, and as the one clip that you played mentioned surprise, it's allowing yourself to be surprised again.

But also for me, it's a little bit falling into whatever is there and kind of letting go of my ego.

So I think the experience is first and the poem follows on the tale of the experience.

But when I go to that writing phase, it's often trying to get close to both the beauty, but also, as Jane suggests, the questions.

Or for me, it's like getting to the edge of the experience of what can't be known or what maybe language can't even touch, the ineffable.

So as a poem writer,

it wants also to invite the reader to that space, both to the space of experience and to the space of mystery.

So I believe there are, but what poetry also employs is what we call gesture.

So everything's not in the poem, but the poem becomes an invitation

to discover what can't be said or isn't said there.

The poet has a little restraint that they use because then it leaves a place.

I call this generosity to the reader.

It leaves a place for the reader to enter the poem and help make meaning.

Well, the one thing that I was noticing that I would mine as a poet is that gesture towards the eternal, because he's talking about the physical, but in the same moment, he's already, as Jane suggested earlier, looking back on

the present, longing for something, but also like there's a little bit hint of the continuum, right?

And the cycle and the eternal.

And somehow I think if the poem can place the reader in that tension between the two, that's where the magic would be.

And also that crack is the same crack that he experienced in his life.