The longer a life, the challenge is not the distance between destinations, but the difficulty of travelling light. My soul’s a portmanteau packed full, one half filled with what was, the other with what is, what should be.

A poet's cultural baggage and erudition can interfere with a poem.

A poet's cultural baggage and erudition can interfere with a poem.

Crim has baggage: expectation, history, responsibility.

She called it baggage. "You're scared to open your suitcases and see what your mother packed.

Imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.