A Woman with a Project

I went to see T.J. Jarrett read poetry last night. God, she’s good. And I came away feeling really inspired by how she thinks about her work and how she struggles with it. It’s good to see artists considering how their minds work.

I think it’s also good for prose writers to read poets. A poet, a good poet anyway, has a relationship with a reader like two people at either end of a jump rope, each also somehow also jumping. Each word must have the necessary weight and efficiency to get both the creator and the reader up in the air. Or maybe the poet is so far from the other end of the jump rope that she can only trust that, since it still goes up and around, someone out of sight jumps for her.

Prose writers get more rope, make nets instead of exercise equipment, but it’s good to see what someone can do with language, metaphor, at its most pared down.