I am trying to be more purposeful in the media I consume, and try to drag myself out of the doldrums of watching others create and not doing myself. I am trying not to scroll IG or Pinterest, tagging things I want to draw that other people already have in an attempt to learn or mimic or re-interpret. I am trying to be more…driven to make.

My habits, as far as visual arts go, have been honed over a lifetime on the internet watching other people make awesome things. As far as the literary arts go, I’m usually reading a book and can’t easily pull out or analyze what I’m reading to inspire my own writing.

Then I read this, and it reminded me, much like when I listen to some great rap bars or an exquisitely turned simile, what I want to do with my own words.

I sent it to a few friends, and one called it “chaotic”. That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of the style, but it at least evokes a reaction more pointed than “this was all right” or “I ain’t reading all that.”

 Love for a poet resists justification like a canyon resists being captured by an iPhone camera. There’s a fugitive hugeness.

I mean…yes. I get it . Why don’t my words come out like this?

Some might call this a hallucination induced by modern fandom, an effect of the parasocial phenomenon that’s been observed ad nauseam.

I would think of these words…eventually.

But this paragraph here is the pinnacle of this article, which, I will admit, I was not intending to read because of my avarice to its subject matter:

It’s the common mistake of talented people to believe it’s they who possess the talent and not the other way around. Talent is a tenant that collects rent. I don’t say this to undercut her abilities. It’s the opposite: She is talent incarnate, manifestly representative of its boons and its Faustian bargain. Talent reduces you to a host. Your best stuff visits you while you fumble haplessly for pen and paper to take dictation. Your worst stuff? It’s when you try too hard. When you interfere. It’s a cruel arrangement. You are a secretary at best, a captive at worst.

GotDAMN.