Anne Valley-Fox

I write from the body. A poem is a physical thing: it breathes, it’s made of rhythm and sound and occupies a spatial dimension. A poem first breaks through consciousness as a vibration, which is why it is sensed long before (if ever) it’s comprehended.

A poet makes everything up, including one’s job description. My job: to retrieve rejected or edgy bits of inner material and put them together in ways that illuminate and provoke. My poems seek connections, complications, and small astonishments.

At times I say to myself that the world has no use for so much contemporary poetry—titles lined up on shelves (and now cyberspace) like so many wallflowers waiting to be plucked. But excess of songbooks and songbirds is hardly our problem. I wish for the world a chaotic abundance of poets, artists, performers, healers, magicians, dreamers and visionaries to counterbalance the steely force of prisons, governments, guns.

The words in a spirited poem want to shape themselves in our mouths and be sounded. This is sometimes enough. As the Greek poet Sappho wrote in the 7th century B.C., “Mere air, these words, but delicious to hear.”