Read my latest story, "A Tale of Two Birthdays", at 52|250.

It is both a privilege and a blessing to be in a place where I can stand back and ask myself how it is that I continue to arrange words into lines & fragments and fragments & lines into constellations on the page. Not to ask the question and to continue composing poems as hundreds die in Gaza, as the anger expressed in protests at the police-murder of a man on a BART platform turns into violence, as so many more atrocities happen every day (because every murder is an atrocity and every rape is an atrocity), would not make that privilege go away.

Why do I keep writing in this world so awry?

I can write some poems of witness, some of my own experience, some of what I have seen, some of what I have only witnessed through the medium of someone else’s witness. I can follow the example of, among others, Carolyn Forche. In a somewhat different category falls the influence of Sylvia Plath; some years ago I read an essay that argued that she connected her personal pain to historical world-horrors, and that way of looking at her work has inspired much of my own poetry, though I am still perhaps too timid in this.

Some poems go to a broader perspective: here is the ugliness and the beauty of the world.

And what do these poems do?

These poems are. They are letters to the future so they can see how we lived, what we feared, that we didn’t all thing the terrible things were just fine. That no matter what anyone says, people were never all blind.

But can they make that future better?

Poems can change the world, not in a heroic sense, not in instant overthrow, but rather, it can change the whole world of one person. Two. Three. However many readers. When people change, the world changes, not because they are inspired to overthrow or scream (necessarily) but because they live differently. If one man learns not to rape because of a poem (or because of two or three poems), that’s at least two lives changed.

We see how poetry can change the world if we remember that the world is made up of a (near) infinity of small things, not just a few things deemed important.

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
- Emily Dickinson

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