During my second ever visit to Chicks on the Square, I joined poet and author Craig Finlay for lunch. When I arrived, he and two other students were already seated and engaged in polite discussion. Finlay had returned to his alma mater, Western Illinois University (WIU), to share his experiences with students through a craft talk, a reading, and a workshop on publishing. Finlay, like many authors, could at first appear somewhat reserved, but beneath the surface was a warm, receptive personality possessing a generosity of insight. As our conversation unfolded, I found him thoughtful and sincere. Finlay is the kind of writer who carries the weight of long contemplation rather than the polish of performance.

The lunch was pleasant and informative. I learned that Finlay has been publishing and hand-producing poetry for many years through small, often self-run micro-presses—a punk-rock approach that has afforded him a unique position within the literary community, balancing autonomy with authenticity.

While the time at Chicks served mainly as a casual introduction, Finlay’s later craft talk and reading revealed a far richer depth of thought. This craft talk was Finlay’s first, and it was a privilege to attend. He spoke as someone still in conversation with his own evolving artistic practice. This immediacy made his ideas particularly engaging.

Finlay challenges traditional expectations of poetic form through an intuitive grasp of narrative and language. He reminded us that poetry does not need to “look like poetry,” a principle embodied in his collection The Very Small Mammoths of Wrangel Island. There, the reader immediately notices his rejection of titles and line breaks—each piece flows seamlessly into the next, creating a textual landscape that resists compartmentalization. Finlay described this approach as a means of protecting the poem from convention, allowing it to exist as a living continuum of thought rather than a series of isolated artifacts.

He summarized his poetic approach in four ideas:

1. The pivot from one idea to another or the “moment a poem changes”
2. The embrace of ambiguity to resist “the tyranny of clear meaning;” avoid writing a poem that means only one thing
3. The importance of showing rather than telling
4. The preference for poems that feel unfinished rather than incomplete

Each of these principles disrupts the expectation that poetry must resolve or clarify. Instead, Finlay’s framework invites the reader to participate in meaning-making—to live within uncertainty rather than to seek closure. I found myself particularly drawn to his belief that one should read poetry that “destroys you.” It reminded me of a truth all too familiar to me: the deepest creative growth often arises from discomfort, from confronting language and experience that unsettle rather than affirm.

His method for overcoming writer’s block reflects an opinion of niche curiosity and openness. Rather than forcing inspiration, Finlay advised us not to “write something you like.” Instead, he turns to the unexpected—taking deep dives into Wikipedia articles and transforming factual prose into poetic narrative. This strategy embodies his fascination with the ambiguity of the English language as a structure for discovery. In his titular poem from The Very Small Mammoths of Wrangel Island, he explores the concept of insular dwarfism, where isolated mammoths evolved to a smaller size than their mainland relatives. The metaphor extends naturally to human creativity: isolation refines, condenses, and distills.

Finlay’s dry humor often brushes the edges of absurdity without descending into satire, and his voice remains grounded in lived curiosity. He avoids moral statements, considering them a trap that leads writers away from humanity’s raw complexity. He believes that some experiences are “too big for a single poem,” and this humility toward language gives his work its organic texture. His poems breathe—they are brief, lightly revised, and deliberately resistant to closure.

Listening to Finlay read his work later in the day, I was struck by how his compositional theories came alive in sound. The absence of line breaks did not make the poems feel formless. Instead, it created a hypnotic rhythm that invited the audience to listen as one might listen to a tide or a long sentence of thought. The experience deepened my understanding of how form follows perception—how a poem’s shape, or lack thereof, mirrors the mental and emotional processes that gave rise to it.

Reflecting afterward, I realized that what I admired most in Finlay’s approach was his quiet defiance—the refusal to write within the constraints of beauty or clarity. His philosophy invites writers to inhabit the uncertain, to resist the temptation to explain. That lesson resonated with me personally. I often seek cohesion and control in my own writing, yet Finlay’s example reminded me that vulnerability and incompleteness can also be forms of truth.

Ultimately, Craig Finlay’s visit to WIU did more than offer a glimpse into another poet’s methods. It revealed how artistic integrity can exist outside institutional frameworks, and how a poet can be at once disciplined and improvisational, rigorous but intent on remaining human. His visit reminded me that poetry, at its best, remains a living experiment—one that, like the miniature mammoths of Wrangel Island, endures through adaptation rather than monument.