This may or may not be anything she would say:

Poems are everywhere. Find them. On social media, in thrift stores, in the air, tucked inside your body, in old typewriters, under rocks, on islands, in what you misread, in the margins, in dreams, in the dead.

Pay attention. Not the kind of attention that excludes multiple forms of attention, but rather the kind that embraces polyattentionality.

Write everything down. Keep it or throw it out, but always save what you’ve thrown out or at least part of what you’ve thrown out. Maybe tear what you’ve thrown out down the middle and rewrite the missing half or join two different halves and see what happens. Maybe take some Wite Out to ninety percent of it and see what emerges. It might be what you were trying to say all along.

Save what others throw out. Rummage through lives and handwritings not your own. Put a gilded frame around discarded words and see if they wriggle back to life.

Don’t be afraid to see a poem in a grocery list or a patient education handout or a menu or a box of rusted paperclips.

Collect things. The stranger, the better. Handle what you collect with love, always. All things are related to each other and to us. Treat things the way you want things to treat you.

Do the work. Make your way. Write as yourself and for yourself. Never write for others. To others, perhaps—letters are a lost art, after all. But if you write for others, you may get lost inside them when you need to get lost inside yourself.

Find one poem you wish you could write but can’t. Carry it with you until the paper it’s printed on is worn thin. When you can write that poem, find another poem that you can’t yet write. Carry it until you can. And so forth.

Know that you will die. If that bothers you, write about it. If not, just write.