For the Birds: Instructions for creative living

#2: At a poetry reading

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Happy Birthday, Ola! Your friendship is the birdsong that follows me everywhere <3

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Instructions for Creative Living: At a poetry reading

1. Friends: if you’re like me, you love poetry, and you consider yourself and have considered yourself a lot of different things throughout your life so far—writer, advocate, daughter—but “poet” has always remained at the top of that list, unchangingly true. So much so that you sneak poetic gestures into most of the writing you do, even when that writing is primarily motivated by utility and could do without the extra flourish or metaphor, but you do it anyway, so invested, so devoted as you are, to the constant meaning making and sense making and feeling making adventure that is taking something from within your head and putting it, directly or otherwise, into language. Also? You kind of hate poetry readings. The first step is to admit this already. Admit what you don’t like so you can pay better attention to what you do.

2. Because you love poetry, and because you are a poet, and because you move through the world according to poetic attention, this truth, and the dissonance it produces, might confuse you at times. That’s okay. It only confuses you when you look at yourself as if you’re someone else, like a non-poet, trying to understand how a poet could possibly dislike poetry readings. But you’re a poet! Stop looking at yourself as if you aren’t. You aren’t two people. You are you: a poet who mostly hates poetry readings. Stop looking at yourself from outside yourself, manipulating your attention away from your own embodied experience of existing in time and space. Sink into yourself and the moment—yes, this one now, even if it finds you sitting at a poetry reading and remembering how much you tend to dislike them. The second step is to be inside yourself, where you belong. You are not a post, or a story, or a tweet. You are a body. Guts and marrow and bone and interiority.