Internal and External Landscapes

Abstract

Writing is a means of understanding, crystallizing, and telling the stories [about interior and exterior landscapes]. Poetry is a means of access to internal and external worlds.

Interior and exterior landscapes are essential complements to each other. The first is the subconscious, the dream world, the imagination, the visionary, the nightmare; the greatest fear and the greatest happiness. The second is the physical world, that which we can see, smell, hear, touch, taste. You know both, in order to gain access to self and place, as they are integral to experience.

I have been many places, in my mind and in my body. Writing about these travels is the critical device I use toward understanding what these places have taught me. The writing, then, is description, remembering; poetry is the delving deep[er], gaining clarity, distilling the power of those moments.