As the daughter of a judge and a court reporter, my conditioning was secular. I was protected against violence and warned against shoplifting, peeping and cheating, but art like crime presented a charismatic, transgressive countenance. Out of the trash heap of language, poetry emerges rich and revolutionary, fecund and childless, genuine and artificial, deadly and peaceful. Who would not want to be an artist once the choice took shape in the mind, and was given a minimum of encouragement to take hold. Not everyone, understandably, but I maintain that more would if they could.
Opportunity is so bound to choice.
Such options are hardly birthrights for the majority. They barely register as options for the minority of the minority. And into this scene rides many a young outlaw. My own writing careens along two vectors which do not always parallel, intersect, or coalesce. One projects itself into a provocative space.