Chapter 3, "The Necessity of Poetry in My Life," sets the stage for the body of the book, an interweaving of poetry and prose. It charts the birth and growth of the artistic personality--what factors impede creative self-understanding and expression, how creative self-understanding and expression come to be.
The poet, as she journeys, is like a human camera. She takes in the details--the smell of the Shabbos cholent, the glistening sweat after the wedding dance, the sound of the dirt as it hits the coffin. All the details are collected, stored away by the poet. And then she sits, with pen, with paper, and makes a record, a particular picture, along the road we travel.
In some of my poems, attention is drawn to empty spaces, to silences that were crying out all this time, to characters who seemed invisible though they stood right before us. Sometimes attention is drawn to the absence of God. These poems may be wistful, or angry, or anguished. Alternately, other poems capture moments in which God--that spirit which sustains us, which nourishes us--seems present in the world, at least in the frame of the picture, and that presence is celebrated.
Many of my poems are prayers--not in any conventional sense, but rather in the most primal sense.
What is prayer? A prayer is the articulation of something very particular at the core of one's being, flung out into the universe. Perhaps it finds a mark, perhaps not. The essential thing is the articulation and the flinging.