So I'm going to read some poems from this new manuscript
I'm working on called "Via Negativa."
And if you're not familiar with the term,
it's often used in talking about theology.
And it's the process of describing a thing
by describing what it is not.
I was very interested and very interested
in this idea of writer or poet as conduit to the divine.
But then physicality, my own and the physicality, of others
kept getting in and the world and our country's politics.
And, well, I let them.
So the manuscript begins with an epigraph
from AR Ammons's Coast of Trees.
So I am going read the epigraph.
"Then with nothing, we turn to the cleared particular,
not more or less than itself, and we realize that whatever it
is, it is in the way, and the way in it, as in us,
emptied full."