I love the momentum of making pots for the wood kiln– a long cycle of throwing and building and imagining how each piece will fill the organic space of the kiln. At the end when I have to quit I feel as if I have scraps of ideas that roll around my brain like incomplete poems. It’s always hard to say, “ok this is it, no more for this cycle.” There is excitement for the firing but a wave of sadness for the unmade.
& then there are those scrap poems, the ones too beautiful to finish writing, ones that would bring us too great a sadness if we ever thought they could really end. There are many of those.
-J. Todd Hawkins, from “Hooks Brothers,” in This Geography of Thorns: Blues Poetry from the Mississippi Delta & Beyond, Poetry Society of Texas, 2020.