Whoever reads philosophy reads himself as much as he reads the philosopher. I am in dialogue with certain decisive events in my life as much as I am with the ideas on the page. Meaning is the matter of my existence. My effort to understand is a perpetual cycling around a few obsessive images.

I found these lines in my notebook, copied from Charles Simic’s essay, “Reading Philosophy at Night” — which I’ve shared below. This essay still resonates with me, and I think it allows the poet space to engage a broader ontological palette, which is to say, all the things we have read, thought, heard, believed… All of it.

“All my experiences make a kind of untaught ontology, which precedes all my readings,” Simic adds. “What I’m trying to conceptualize with the help of the philosopher is that which I’ve already intuited. That’s one way of looking at it.”

These ways of looking at it are the work of poetry.