Both the poet and scholar are trying to learn something. The poem for me is a pursuit. Some of the answers are within. Some of the answers are without.
I tend to integrate poet and scholar is by ironizing the scholarship. My hope is to disturb that space between the two so they can coexist in a kind of mutual uncertainty.
I admit I keep a clichéd ironic distance with many things in the world, but Brooklyn is not one of them.
On top of whatever else I'm doing, I'm usually teaching some form of composition. The benefit of this is I get to read across disciplines. Often enough that work spills over to my creative reading/thinking, and I reach a point of saturation where I can't distinguish between texts and writers and everything starts to blur and smudge together.
My own emotional health issues were bullying me during the time I was drafting that poem. It was a pressure I couldn't pin down or diagnose. And like many, if not most, writers I had the self-consciousness to recognize it made great conditions for writing.
