why I write poetry

1: To move people. I think I managed to do that in some small way today.

2: ‘[Poetry] is a mystery. It is a metaphor of the other mysteries which comprise human experience. But, like some other mysteries, it gives us a feeling of illumination – one mystery giving us a name by which to know another. I confess I think of poetry in a religious way. But I don’t mean by that I regard it with any hushed and special reverence. I mean simply that I think of it as a way of using what we know, to glimpse what we do not know. I remember [...] becoming aware that there was a power in the words [of a particular poem] which the words themselves could not seem to account for, and which I felt strongly but could not understand. I realized that this power must be the poetry of the lines.’ – W. S. Merwin

Two weeks today till I hand in. Top deadline tip: making trifle (from scratch, sponge fingers included) is extremely calming.

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