Religion & spirituality are fine things, but literature & poetry have to stand on their own two feet.

We take an interest in art as art, not as politics or philosophy.

If poetry doesn't please us in its own right, then it will never edify us either.

*

That being said, I am not simply a poet. I do not worship at the Temple of Art.

My life suggests (as I see it, anyway) a comic (or pathetic) melodrama, full of stumbles & slippage between artistic & religious interests & enthusiasms.

Every writer brings their own preoccupations & subject-matter to Poetry per se.

Maybe in a case like mine the private preoccupations have overwhelmed the common idiom, the shared life, ordinary speech.

Well, everybody's different. I'm working out my views on what's what. & as I see it, Life is Drama.

It would be good, as a reader of poetry, to find a special quiet space where all the middling discourse, the "talk-about", the peripheral chatter & observations, have no place at all. The ideal poet would be consistently closed-mouthed about the poems. They would simply be sent out into the world, to take their place with the other serious business out there which employs human language.