The Call, the Echo, the Response

Part of writing is the struggle to believe in what you write. That is the blessing and the pressure and the curse. Often times, too often, a writer is better at writing than living up to what they've written. I fear this terribly, at all times. I told someone once they were a better poet than a friend, which is, perhaps, the cruelest thing I've ever said. Granted, at the time, the circumstances required a certain severity and coldness, but still. I am guilty of almost every accusation I've ever placed upon a person, especially when it comes to poetry. The self that one prepares in a poem, the speaker that both is and is not the "I" that is the poet, to whom or what is that accountable? If writing is incapable of saving us from each other and from ourselves, of creating action and tangibility, what can? What ever weight is great or terrible in us, may we, at the very least, place it in the center of the word. And the word, then, if it is true that language is, as Oppen claims it is, the creative act by which we are alive, may we proceed to the best of our abilities and with all the grace of the tradition, and with the urgency of needing to be human, and with the human need for meaning in a world where meaning is not a given but an act of making and of faith, to place it safely in the center of ourselves.