February 9, 2013SunsetGuy Kettelhack

“For a good long stretch of my writing life, circumstances were kind enough to permit me to produce and publish yards of prose, categorized (although I’ve since come to believe there is no such thing) as ‘nonfiction.’ In the late ’90s, I fell off and climbed painfully back up several steep emotional cliffs, one effect of which was to induce me to write poems. I didn’t do it because I liked ‘poetry’ per se—it was more that I couldn’t imagine how else to begin to do justice to perception and experience. Sentences suddenly seemed tedious—I needed to get quicker to an artery. Twelve or thirteen years later, on April 1, 2009, with no fanfare, I sat down and did the first drawing I’d done for decades. I’ve done one a day (pretty much) ever since. While every drawing seems to want to be a companion to a poem, each occupies a strange relation to the other. If they’re twins, they’re fraternal; but they more often strike me as strangers passing each other in the street—catching each other’s eye for a moment, establishing fleeting, sometimes uneasy, sometimes friendly pacts with each other.”