On My Craft: A Manifesto

I believe, along with Audre Lorde, that “poetry is the language of the marginalized.” This is the source and pulse of my craft. To approach the page is to confront limitations— those imposed by the world, by another, or by the self. Therefore, I believe that to write is to perform the ultimate act of resistance, of defiance.

I do not force poems into being. I reject the mechanical grind of routine. In a world that seeks to constrain creativity, I believe in poems that emerge as they must, out of necessity, out of urgency, not as products of artificial attempt. This is not to say that poetry is without effort, but rather that the demand for production under capitalist and societal pressures is a fundamentally flawed one.

I refuse singularity. I insist on plurality. I believe language is not fixed, not objective, but fluid, contradictory, and alive. The page is the home for contradiction, yet also a maker of truth.

I refuse answers. I seek resonance, not resolution. I write toward curiosity, toward the unending, toward questions that burn brighter than any conclusion. To write for the sake of thesis is to move against the grain of the form. A poem (or a poet) that claims to know the answer is, by my definition, neither.

I understand that the poem is inherently political and I approach the page with sensitivity, thinking of everything that language carries: its histories, its violences, its silences, and its possibilities. To write is never neutral. It is to intervene, to unsettle, to imagine, to bring to fruition. I honor the weight of words while daring to bend them, refusing the myth of “apolitical” art.

I reject the dismissal of love as trivial, soft, or without weight. The love poem, the sonnet, the elegy, these forms were born from the acknowledgement of love as muse. I refuse the flattening of love into cliché, the commodification of it into marketable sentiment. I insist on love as a radical substance, as a force, as the beating core of my craft. 

I acknowledge poetry as a presence that lives among us. Few accept the task of becoming its vessel. I do not define or categorize poetry. I accept and believe that when originating from the right place– one of question, of curiosity, of urgency—all is poetry, regardless of form. I reject the insistent need for category, for validation by academic or societal standards.