Years ago, I was asked by a literature professor and mentor to consider the Meta influences on my writing. It would have been easy enough to list the books that I love and the authors I respect. No one had ever asked me to consider what, outside the world of words, brings the most to bear on my words. I struggled at first, then I gave myself permission to briefly resist the rigid categories that govern so much of my life.

I found that the small list I was asked to generate became a litany of experiences, phenomena, albums, tastes, colours, and smells. What I want my writing to evoke is the smell of the richest, most generously dark coffee filling the rooms of the house on a Sunday morning—a rainy Sunday morning—that you sip to the backdrop of real jazz (Oscar Peterson, Charlie Parker, and Dave Brubeck come to mind). If, someday, I write a sentence as pure and crystalline as Ella Fitzgerald’s phrasing, then I will have done something.

If the subtle, staggering quality of twilight could meet the badass cachet of the limited, but addictive flight of a perfectly executed skateboard jump, could then merge with a clean, even vodka martini (with three olives) then that would be the book I’d most like to find somewhere beneath all the false layers and contrived nonsense that all writers have to fight against all the time.

The main themes of the poems, essays, and articles in this space are varied: Weight and image issues, absent male presence, race, the tension between instinct and intellect, and the detachment that results from repeated rejection—on both a large and small scale—are all there and tinge the narrative.

The voice is more plaintive than playful, but self-deprecating humour emerges here and there. I reject many of the notions that get bandied about in workshops, including the all-out war against abstraction in prose, but I do understand the value in bringing the much-needed gravitas of the concrete instance and image to more perfectly convey what is intended.

I am trying to get there.

The poems that comprise my master’s thesis are “finished” in a manner of speaking. I had the privilege of learning many truths from Lucille Clifton during my undergrad years at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She is the only one who has ever defined poetry for me in a way that is satisfying. “Poetry,” she often said “is the naming of things.” She also told her class, repeatedly, “Poems are never finished. They are only abandoned.”

The two poems here that are not part of my M.A. Thesis were written shortly after its completion. They both have unexplored roads to travel, and in truth may both have to be broken completely apart in order to come back in some other iteration, in a more permanent home than this transient Web space.

The essays are works in progress—not indicative of finished craft—but they are not the undisciplined, misshapen things they were.