Beautiful Questions

How does art help us survive?

“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers.”- James Baldwin, The Creative Process

Process > Result

I was raised by two Spanish literature professors who both studied poetry, theater, and fiction for a living. I grew up with words and language as the most precious forms of art. Perhaps because of this academic upbringing, I have a rather ambivalent relationship to the idea of literary acclaim and criticism; both wanting to please and awe the powers that be and also to rebel against them.

Yes, I dream of developing a body of beautifully crafted and meticulously executed poems that I can submit to the most prestigious publishers and even receive awards for. But I care just as much about people reading my work and getting something from it now, when the words are fresh, and current, and hot.

While I believe it is important to examine our work, to critique it, to get honest feedback, and to explore it through an intellectual lens. I also believe we need to balance that with creativity, openness, and experimentation. We must constantly consider who has the power to decide what qualifies work as “good”or not.

I would love to take more time to edit my work, sculpting each stanza into a perfect gemstone—something dazzling, something undeniable. But I also know that the process of writing and sharing is more important to me, personally, than the result.

Beautiful Questions

Lately, I’ve been thinking about something Ross Gay said in an interview when asked about how he teaches students to improve a poem:

Alex Chambers: How do I… make this poem better?

Ross Gay: I wish for your poem everything that it wants to be, I really do. And I'm happy to talk with anyone about it. But I'm way less interested in that, frankly, than what's maybe behind the questions of the poems.

Because the poems always have questions that are bigger than the thing of making a good poem…

There's always these bigger questions, the great questions, that focusing on fixing the thing or making a better thing, or making the best thing, actually obscures.

If we follow that through, part of the sorrow of a lot of education is that there is this…a set of fundamental and abiding and necessary and beautiful questions, like, "How do we care for one another?" That really get obscured by, "How do I be the best? How do I succeed?

You can listen to the full Ross Gay interview here. It’s a good one.

While I may spend my life learning and improving my craft, I also want to write poems that help people feel less alone. I want to ask those beautiful questions. Questions like:

• How does art help us survive?

• How do we root ourselves in a world that often feels uprooted?

• What does it mean to belong—to the earth, to each other, to ourselves?

• How do we practice tenderness in a culture built on extraction?

• What can we learn from moss, from tide pools, from decay?

• How do we make space for sorrow without being swallowed by it?

• How do we honor what we’ve lost while making room for what’s next?

• How can I be so many different things at once?

• How can we save each other from loneliness?

• How can we remain good people while so many bad ones are in power?

My own work is so much about holding contradictions—being both wild and rooted, both hermit and community-builder, both sensitive and fierce. These questions don’t have easy answers, but that’s the point, right? They’re meant to be lived rather than solved.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.”- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Journal Prompts

What beautiful questions are you asking in your life? What questions do your poems ask?

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