I do. I have to breathe. When I stand in front of a group of people to read poetry, I have to breathe. I wish I wrote with my own need to breathe in mind. That would make it so much easier to stand up and say my poems out loud. My friend tells me that I should read slower because people need more time to process what they are hearing. I’m sure that’s true. But when I hear myself think it is with fluidity and rapidity, with a kind of musicality that could only be interrupted by sticking places to breathe into it.
Next time I write a poem I’m going to write breath marks into it as if I were writing a piece for the flute. Then I’m going to practice reading it with breaths in the predetermined spots.
That’s all. That’s all I want to say. I promised I would blog every day during December. I’ve just come from a reading of poems during which all I could think about was how much I needed to breathe. I’m sure I need more time on the treadmill and some new asthma medicine, but I also need to convince the voice I hear inside me when I write that it would have to breathe if it said that many words in a row out loud.
