1. Some things can only be achieved through failure. This requires a reconceptualization of what it means to succeed: being comfortable with the presence of the one, and with the absence of the other one.

1.1 Sometimes it’s the words that hold us back, that force us into or out of things. It is of special importance that poets pay attention to this conditioning.

1.2 Sometimes we want to be held, pressed, bumped, and/or forced by the words, in which case a poet should be able to distinguish between habit and choice.

1.3 Writing is the act of distinguishing between habit and choice: of maintaining the open space rather than the bordered one; of making the one bigger (messier) and the other one smaller (less inhibiting).

2. It is unquestionably hard to live in the present moment because we forget that this moment is “a fragment of greater time” (Mary Ruefle) and busy ourselves with trying to contain it as a separate whole.

2.1 Replace the phrase “live in the present moment” with “write,” and “this moment” with “our writing,” and “greater time” with “all writing,” and “contain” with “produce,” for another way.

3. Substituting “I” with “you” in a poem, in the wrong circumstances, can be unnecessary, offensive, or even false.

3.1 Substituting “I” with “you” in real life is, under many circumstances, called empathy.

3.2 Language is not an inherently empathetic system. The poet does the best she can.

4. Seek original ideas as if they actually existed. (Nevermind.)

5. The body is the biggest secret, & the biggest embarrassment, & because of these qualities it is the biggest poem: a living object in which the internal and the external become not just difficult to separate but linked as if in perpetual duel.

5.1 Embarrassment implies revelation. This way is less interested in the act of secrecy than it is in the act of deliberate sharing (of the body); it is a kind of spilling; it is a poem coming out of your mouth in front of others.

5.2 Poetry readings are consistently very embarrassing.

6. Most poems are either about one thing, that one, or its corresponding counterpart, the other one. It is up to the poet to decide which, and when.