Listening, Inspiration, and Terry Tempest Williams

The latest issue of Poets & Writers  has a great interview with Terry Tempest Williams.  Among other things, she speaks of having lost her sense of poetry after September 11, 2001. So at high tide on the Maine coast, she “said to the sea, ‘Give me one wild word, and I promise I will follow.’ I listened for some time.”



A word did roll back, which we learn about in the interview, as well as how she followed up on it with research, and with her hands as well as her head. This work led her to write Finding Beauty in a Broken World.

I don’t have what it takes to start a book by calling into the wind for one word, but I’m willing to try for a poem or, well, a line. And couldn’t an imagined ocean, or trees, or snowfall speak back, too? If one listens very hard.