We can only approach our poems like bringing lives into this world - living, breathing, & hopefully undying things. The infallibility of your work should be in it’s truth to you, yet we as the poets, the demigods creating but also know our work may die, may kill, may destroy, may take a whole life of its own.
The best advice for poetry I ever received (by a white cis straight man no less) was “write every poem as if you are a demigod, you can manifest anything as real but still can face some mortal consequence”. While I don’t suggest innocuously taking such a privileged approach to poetry, there should be a level of infallibility that you should feel when you create. There is an elitism that fosters performative rigor but also stalls the motivation to innovate from new & unheard voices. Writers whose voices & canons are brutal, concrete, lasting, though constantly decaying. There is an unfortunate amount of arrogance in poetry, usually distributed among the most mediocre of writers.
What advice do you have for young and emerging writers, particularly of marginalized identities? What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
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