Here’s what I was saying to my husband who I’ve coerced into blogging on blogger to see if he likes it and the blogosphere likes him:

YOU MUST BE A WRITER. Why do writers write as if their lives depended upon communicating in this particular way? I go to the professionals.

Philip Roth: [T]o safeguard what little equilibrium I still possessed, I chose to sit as I have been sitting all my life, in a chair, at a desk, under a lamp, substantiating my peculiar existing in the most consolidating way I know, taming temporarily with a string of words the unruly tyranny of my incoherence. from Operating Shylock.

[T]he process of revising a poem is no arbitrary tinkering, but a continued honing of the self at the deepest level. Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates – Entering the Mind of Poetry.

The poem, then, is not a transcription of an already known world, but a process of discovery, and the act of writing . . . is one that demands personal risks. [The poet does] not write solely in order to express himself, but to orient himself within his own life and take his stand in the world and it is this feeling of necessity that communicates itself to a reader. [P]oems are more than literary artifacts. They are a means of staying alive. Paul Auster, The Poetry of Exile, from The Art of Hunger.

And the reason to read? To compare my own idiosyncratic, sometimes joyous and sometimes dreadful, subjective experience with that of my fellows – to feel kinship; to be “well met” and as a hedge against isolation and it’s first cousin, insanity.

As Galway Kinnell (poet) wrote: if you write your own experience deeply enough, yours becomes just the voice of another creature on the planet speaking.