When I was very young, I became enamored of the Encyclopedia Britannica. My parents were enamored with road trips. Mother tells me I made it through the entire set of encyclopedias while traveling between wherever home was at the time and sites like Mesa Verde in Colorado or Flathead Indian ruins in various Southwest locales. It took me a remarkably short time to learn that what I needed to know wasn't going to come from reading, alone. On one trip, my father gave me a book about the Flathead Indians whose cliff dwellings we were on our way to explore. By the time we arrived at our first climb, I knew how the Flathead Indians had built their papoose cradles and how the design deformed infant skulls. I knew that they built their homes into the high cliffs to protect themselves from marauders. What I didn't know was that I was terrified of heights. This I learned on a hand-built pole ladder three levels up a 150-foot cliff. I have never forgotten that trip – climbing through abandoned homes carved into a steep rock face, an antique smell of smoke and urine. The minutia of that climb acid-etched in my memory: heat quivering off red sandstone, scoring my face — a flawless azurite sky — the park ranger's sweat smell as he struggled to move me up or down that ladder — my mother's white knuckles on the rungs below — my own hands frozen claws that wouldn't release without prying. I learned something that day about the fierceness of an entire group of people. I learned it while clinging to a ladder, my eyes inches away from the hand and foot holds the Flatheads used instead of ladders to climb vertical sandstone.

Art does not happen for me when the approach is either too academic or too untrained. Separately, these approaches allow only a specialized ideal. Real life wears frayed hems and worn heels. The most perfect piece of art is sometimes the most flawed but only if the flaw is intended and comes out of deliberation. It startles us. It moves us outside our private boxed set of opinions into a changed imagination. This is what a poem, a painting, a story wears as bone and sinew. Move me with intelligence and control in the midst of what is raw and chaotic. That's when I'll call you an artist.

I embrace paradox, the bedmate of change. It's in the midst of oppositions that discoveries infringe, crowding into sight lines. I cannot believe in both form and chaos without considering each as part of its opposite. That's how the world comes by concepts like Chaos Theory.

There are poets whom I admire for their ability to embrace tradition while remaining true to personal voice. Marilyn Hacker's sonnets come to mind. They are subtle, brilliantly executed, show clear understanding of the form and its history. Her voice flows through a sonnet the way it would flow through a prose poem. You are never too conscious of form underlying word. Visual artists must do the same. Chuck Close shows an understanding of anatomy and chiaroscuro, but his paintings leap beyond boundaries into a kind of pixilated realism — his signature style. It's when artists in any genre re-imagine the criteria of older formulas and work to create something entirely their own that art succeeds.

A character in a series of poems I'm currently working on said, 'Give me the excellent moment. It's all I want.' Art's intent should be to give us that moment."