Life-Built Poems

Willa Cather once wrote, “Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.  The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.” This is a thing I’ve been trying to do in my poetry, I think.  Refining that “sense of truthfulness” is really all about asking whether I’m dancing around blathering bullshit  or actually standing there, flat-footed, talking true.