The Poet'S Assignment

​Poets have a critical role to play in envisioning possibilities. Poets dialog with the pasts—with biological, cultural, and spiritual ancestors—with nature and the nonhuman—with the space between, the interrelational—with locations other than androcentrism, heteropatriarchy, and colonial modernity—with mother-lineages and the regenerative spiral—to create new paradigms of healing and synthesis. Through listening into the zones of fracture, poets engender relationships with that which is gathered in the interconnected, fluid, untamable, polysemous pneuma. In that place where the past, present, and future meet—a place of paradoxes—poets bring forth a knowing of connection (regeneration), activating the future. 

(I adapted this statement on poetry for an anthology from an essay on Visionary Poetics published last year. Read the essay here or here.)