Today I found a twenty in the red-lined pocket of my wool coat. There’s no twenty-dollar bill in the red lining of my uterus.

Poems are what you make when you experience life in a certain way. Alive to yourself in the world, observant of inner and outer reality, and connected to language.

Poetry is an intimate act. It’s about bringing forth something that’s inside you – whether it is a memory, a philosophical idea, a deep love for another person or for the world, or an apprehension of the spiritual. It’s about making something, in language, which can be transmitted to others – not as information, or polemic, but as irreducible art.

This is your genius: your own profound desire to write. Your love of words and language, your attempt to get to what poet Donald Hall called “the unsayable said.” If.

Imagine a sentence as a hall with a series of doors. Each door is a possible way to use what you’ve already written to generate new material.

I’m so in love with you I can’t stand up.

Love’s merciless, the way it travels in and keeps emitting light.

I want to walk like I’m the only woman on earth and I can have my pick.

Maybe you’re one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don’t read, your writing is going to suck.

Love me like a wrong turn on a bad road late at night.