The second portion of a lecture I gave for The Chicago Literary Society on January 16, 2006. You can read the first portion by visiting the blog.

Poetry and Responsibility

At the outset of my remarks I said that I would look more broadly at the subject of poetry and responsibility. For me, that starts with the question of poetry and personal responsibility, then moves to poetry and civic, or public, responsibility.

Robert Frost has secured his place as a major American poet. When I read his poems, as spare and musical and perfect as the classical models from which he learned, I think that no American poet of the 20th century could have worked his material harder. (Frost may have been an indifferent farmer, may have hammered together rude boards for a writing stand, but if you wonder about how hard he worked at his real “work,” just look at the achieved perfection of poems like “The Silken Tent.”.) But dark tales of Frost the man, which we learn from the biographies, make one think again about the work. Frost was heard to say, after the suicide of his son Carol, “My poems are my children.” That’s great for the poems, I thought, but what about the children? It is a step in our loss of innocence to learn that the poems which have given meaning to our lives are sometimes written by people with whom we would not enjoy having dinner. What then of this paradox, as old as art, of great poems written by not-so-great people? The poems after all are still the poems, regardless of who wrote them. In a few generations, when living memory of the author is gone, the work will remain. Readers will return to it or not according to its powers to help them live their own lives. Here is what I have told myself in answer to this conundrum: “Poets, like anyone else, are capable of the best and the worst behavior. The poem is where the poet goes to be the best person he or she can be; to have the world not as it is but as it should be.” But this answer, to be candid, feels improvised, convenient and sophistical.

Here, in translation, is a forward to her poems written by Russian poet Anna Akhmatova.

In the terrible years of Yezhovism I spent seventeen months standing in line in front of the Leningrad prisons. One day someone thought he recognized me. Then, a woman with bluish lips who was behind me and to whom my name meant nothing, came out of the torpor to which we were all accustomed and said, softly (for we spoke only in whispers), “ — And that, could you describe that?” And I said, “Yes. I can.” And then a sort of smile slipped across what had been her face.

At a reading a few years ago of a new translation of her poems, someone suggested that she, a better poet than mother, had gone to the prison only once during the seventeen months her son was imprisoned there, even though her preface states otherwise. The least hint of fraud has the most chilling effect on my admiration for a poet’s work. If the poet’s life is completely at odds with the poet’s work, how can the voice in the poem be speaking to us with that utter honesty which is the hallmark of poetry? How do we separate the poet from the poem, the dancer from the dance? In questions of poetry and personal responsibility, we may look into the poet’s heart and still not know the truth — even when the heart in question is our own.

Poetry and public responsibility, on the other hand, can be measured against the world it seeks to influence. Ezra Pound, the P.T. Barnum of Modernism in poetry, began to make his presence felt a century ago. The founder of literary magazines and literary movements (Blast, Imagism, Vorticism); iconoclast writer about writing (Guide to Kulture); early promoter of Joyce, Eliot and Frost, Pound set American poetry on the course it was to follow for the next century. To his own poetry he brought perhaps the finest ear of his time:

From the long boats they have set lights in the water,
The sea’s claw gathers them outward.
Scilla’s dogs snarl at the cliff’s base,
The white teeth gnaw in under the crag,
But in the pale night the small lamps float seaward.

This supremely confident man, who knew what to do and how to go about it in the poetry world, was completely unhinged when it came to the rest of the world. He tried to make poetry do everything, to make poetry the lever that would move the world. (How I admire that!) But what came out was a compost of Fascist rant, anti-Semitic raving and crackpot economic theory. As the years went by and the big literary prizes eluded him in favor of his protégés, Pound’s behavior degenerated from the exuberant to the outrageous to the self-injurious. His wartime radio addresses in support of Mussolini landed him in an Allied prison camp at the end of WW II. In lieu of a treason trial he was committed to the prison ward of St. Elizabeth’s hospital for the insane. Twelve years later, through the intercession of the major American poets of the time (a story in itself), he was released and for the rest of his long life barely spoke or wrote again. Who can know what was in his mind, but to me Pound’s act of silence was the equivalent of Oedipus putting out his own eyes when he saw what he had done.

Ezra Pound is almost a role model for any poet wanting to get completely crosswise with the external world. Contrast this with the career of W.B. Yeats as a public man of his time.

I walk down the long school room questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and histories,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way — the children’s eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

Pound and Yeats were not contemporaneous in age but they overlapped (the younger Pound served Yeats as personal secretary for a time). The events of Irish independence, culminating in Easter 1916, swept up both Yeats the poet and Yeats the patriot. As a leading Irish literary figure Yeats was a founder of the Irish National Theatre and ran the Abbey Theatre. He suffered the daily trials of any businessman with deadlines to meet, and these fed back into his poetry.

The fascination of what’s difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There’s something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road-metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day’s war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I’ll find the stable and pull out the bolt.

The title of the collection containing this poem, published in 1916, was “Responsibilities.” (The epigram for the book, which could serve as epigram for our theme tonight, reads: “In dreams begins responsibility.”) Unlike Pound, Yeats the poet was always able to see how poetry sat with the larger world, as in these lines from “Adam’s Curse.”

‘A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.’

Yeats was keenly aware of the demarcation between the worlds of external and internal realities. Frequently his poems record the public man suddenly aware of the poet anguishing within.

Both Pound and Yeats were activists who sought to influence the political events around them, respectively the rise of Fascism and the rise of Irish nationalism, but with opposite personal outcomes. A cynic might say that Pound’s mistake was in choosing the wrong (i.e., losing) side. But the Irish rebellion of Easter 1916 failed as well. I would rather ascribe the success of Yeats and the failure of Pound to their differing views on how one goes about trying to change the world. Pound saw the world at large as an extension of the one he knew, the world of poetry, and spoke to it accordingly. One can only imagine the bureaucrats in Mussolini’s government reading this canto against usury with a view to extracting a usable fiscal policy:

Usura rusteth the chisel
It rusteth the craft and the craftsman
It gnaweth the thread in the loom
None learned to weave gold in her pattern;
Azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisy is unbroidered
Emerald findeth no Memling
Usura slayeth the child in the womb
It stayeth the young man’s courting
It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth
between the young bride and her bridegroom

CONTRA NATURAM

They have brought whores for Eleusis
Corpses are set to banquet
at behest of usura.

Yeats saw the world of poetry and the world at large as separate and dealt with each on its own terms. He wrote great poems about the events of his day; he used his stature as a leading poet to get involved; he then worked, not as poet but as politician and administrator, to influence those events. Poets before and after these two have tried it both ways. In the Yeatsian model one could name poets as early as Sir Thomas Wyatt and John Milton, and as recent as Archibald McLeish and Vaclav Havel. All of these poets, many of them major poets, influenced the world around them not as poets but through their talents as accomplished men of affairs. In the Poundian model one could name poets as early as William Blake and Percy Shelley, and as recent as Amir Baraka and Poets Against the War. Poets of the Poundian model, up there in their declamatory ozone, tend to write with more certitude but sometimes with less influence than those of the Yeatsian model. When Shelley declared poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” he was claiming the high moral ground for the kind of truth in which poetry deals. But when Amiri Baraka famously or infamously asserted in his 9/11 poem,

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away?

he was asserting as fact something which the general public would regard as fabrication. The effect was to impair the credibility and reduce the influence of the poem with all but those already inclined to agree with Baraka. In fact “Somebody Blew Up America” is the words of a partisan speaking to partisans. Such poetry rallies the already persuaded by giving voice to their shared passions, but it makes few converts. Nor is that what it intends. This preaching is directed not at the congregation of the undecided but at the choir.

When the sponsors of Poets Against the War opened their website, they were doing so under a kind of continuous dissenters’ rights which is, as we have seen, part of the franchise of modern poetry. If the purpose of public protest is to rally the advocates and to publicize your views, then Poets Against the War exceeded by a country mile the hopes of its founders. It attracted the participation of thousands of poets and coverage by the national news media. Moving beyond the poetry world it became a cultural gathering ground for all those opposing U.S. military action in Iraq. It was the equivalent of those anti-Vietnam demonstrations in the 1960s. No doubt the movement also galvanized those opposing the opposers, who saw in Poets Against the War arrogation on a massive scale and a massive display of adolescence. (The performance of the poets reminded one observer of “lemmings, wilding and Woodstock.”) In itself that indignation probably amused the gadfly-organizers of PAW. But if the aim of public protest is also to influence the course of events by exerting pressure on those in power, then PAW would have to admit failure. The only visible effect of Poets Against the War on the Bush Administration was to postpone indefinitely the reception for poets which had been scheduled at the White House.

Poetry can lend emotional weight to one side or the other of the great issues of its day. (Think of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and its electrifying effect on the passions of the abolitionists in the Civil War.) This power of poetry to sway public debate places a hefty burden of responsibility on the poet. All the more so because poetry does not arise from the kind of logic on which questions of public policy is debated. Its appeal comes not from reason or logic but from the emotional appeal of a point of view memorably expressed. The risk is that the poet’s knowledge of the right course of action will be no better than anyone else’s; if you look at the choices they have made in their personal lives, it may not be as good. A further risk is that poetry written for political ends may not be poetry at all, but propaganda. (As someone said, “Art is an invitation to an idea; propaganda is a call to action.”)

Plato famously placed poetry “on the level of opinion, along with fancy and belief.” He did not regard it as knowledge or truth, and therefore excluded poets from his perfect Republic — at least those poets of the Poundian variety. Yeats, on being asked for a war poem, responded with “On Being Asked for a War Poem.”

I think it better in times like these
A poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter’s night.

Yeats, an elected member of the Irish senate, presumably saw in the poet the citizen at the end of the world.

The first portion of a lecture I gave for The Chicago Literary Society on January 16, 2006.

Poetry and Protest

When we think of poets and their public speech today, we are likely to think of poetry as protest. In America our poets oppose, with a passion approaching ferocity, the war in Iraq and the current administration generally. Many of you will recall “Poets Against the War,” the Internet-based, anti-war demonstration that drew such attention a few years ago. That opposition continues, most recently in a letter from the poet Sharon Olds publicly declining an invitation to the White House: “I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of candles, and I could not stomach it.” Many of you will also remember our poets in protest forty years ago, when the war was Vietnam and the poet was Robert Lowell, publicly refusing an invitation to visit the Johnson White House. It would be easy to connect these dots, and other dots in the history of Modernist poetry, and conclude that this is what poets have always done: oppose their government, and protest in time of war. The purpose of my talk this evening, “The Citizen at the End of the World: The Poet’s Role in Society,” is to test that impression against a historical context and then, more broadly, to think about poetry and responsibility.

Anti-war poetry began not as a poetry of political protest so much as a poetry which registered the horrors of modern warfare. In the poems of Wilfred Owen, who was killed in 1919, a week before the Armistice ending the First World War, the sensibility of a Georgian poet runs full tilt into the realities of trench warfare on the western front.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning….
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, — 
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

This poem, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” serves our discussion as a kind of fulcrum point. Not only does it set the tone for the 20th century war poetry which followed; but the irony of its title makes the point that the poet’s attitude towards war was not always thus. “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” translates to “Sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country.” Horace may have written those words, a few decades before the birth of Christ, knowing that they would be read by his patron, the Roman emperor Augustus — but he wrote them nonetheless. Virgil, a mentor of Horace who also enjoyed the patronage of Augustus, struck much the same tone in The Aeneid. Armed combat in The Aeneid is the occasion for heroes to demonstrate their courage, strength, cunning, their leadership in the pursuit of noble aims. Virgil took as the model for his epic the twin epics of Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey. Here again, for Homer war is the stage on which human destiny — with divine intervention — plays out. Vivid scenes of hand-to-hand combat — fully as gruesome as those in Owen’s poem — populate The Iliad. But death in combat, in all its gory detail, leads neither Homer nor Virgil nor Horace to repugnance and the moral repudiation of Owen and the Modernists. It probably did not occur to the ancients to think of war as something avoidable — or even undesirable. Virgil used the Trojan War to create a mythical past and divine sponsorship for his Rome. Homer used it to explain the ways of gods to men. That tradition carried over into English literature, when Milton wrote his Christian epic to explain the ways of God to man. In Paradise Lost, the battle for Heaven between God and Lucifer is the necessary prelude to explaining original sin. For most of the history of Western literature — call it 3,000 years — the attitude of poets has not been to oppose war per se. The anti-war poetry that is with us today is of recent vintage — not quite a century.

The poetry of political protest, as distinct from anti-war poetry, has a somewhat longer, but not dissimilar history. A few years ago, when I was teaching poetry in an MFA program, a faculty colleague posed this question to my class: How can one write poetry in an empire? The question referred to the Bush administration (the “empire” was America today) and the war in Iraq. My answer, not the one she wanted to hear, was that most poetry has been written under conditions of empire. Given the political history of the world, which is basically the story of the rise and fall of empires, it could hardly be otherwise. If we confine “poetry of political protest” to its current meaning, which is poetry written against one’s own government, it goes back further than anti-war poetry, if not so far as the ancients. Because Ireland has produced so many great poets, and because Ireland has for so long been a restive member of the British Empire, one can find a strain of protest extending back through the 20th century and beyond. The satires of Swift connect in an unbroken line to the poems of Yeats on the Easter Rebellion of 1916. Nor is the poetry of political protest limited to the Irish. In the English Romantic poets the political awakening that was then sweeping Europe is clearly present. Although none of these wrote poems against their own government, Wordsworth embraced the French Revolution, initially at least; Byron died with the freedom fighters in Greece; Shelley was a political firebrand. Nor is the poetry of protest limited to the British Empire. The underground poetry that survives from the Stalin era certainly includes political protest. And there might have been more Osip Mandelstams had the penalties for such writing not included the gulag or execution.

But not all political poetry is a poetry of protest. Running as deep and perhaps much further back, is the poetry of patriotism and love for one’s country. I don’t mean here “The Ballad of the Green Berets” and similar verse from the front which is not taken seriously in the poetry community. I mean Whitman in poems such as “I Hear America Singing” and “For You O Democracy” and all of the martial poems in Drum-Taps, including “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and “O Captain! My Captain!” I mean the plays of Shakespeare, whose histories were carefully crafted to celebrate and justify the Elizabethan monarchy whose patronage the King’s Men enjoyed. And the Greeks, who called upon the poet Simonides to write the epitaph for the fallen Spartans at Thermopolae:

Go tell the Spartans, passerby,
That here, by Spartan law, we lie.

Why, then, is the poetry now written in America, when it addresses war and politics, so vituperative and single-sided? One reason, I think, is that most of the anti-war poets have not been there. They write not from a personal experience of combat but from university campuses, where patriotism is not fashionable and opposition to war is a matter of principle and political persuasion. Actual combat experience is by turns boring, exhausting, terrifying. Poetry written from the battlefield is likely to take no position at all on the wisdom or necessity of the war in which it occurs. Its subject is the intensity and complexity of combat itself: the self-knowledge that comes uniquely from looking death in the face. (Think of The Red Badge of Courage, where the protagonist wonders whether he will fight or run — and in the event does both.)

That leaves unanswered the question of why there is no second strain — the poetry of patriotism and love of country — apparent in contemporary American poetry. It is a question I can pose but not answer. It is a question that invites reflection by other poets.

What a moment it is, to find a poet whose work is unlike any other, and is so good that we pray the poetry gods will keep her safe and warm and grant her a long life of writing such poems for us. For me that moment was when I read her poems in Poetry magazine years ago.

Sarah Lindsay writes with a sensibility that is hungry to explore the extremes of human experience. Of a polar explorer: “On the southern ice cap, one turns his frozen socks inside out//and shakes his blackened toes into his lap.” Her tool of discovery is a remarkable imagination that takes her on a deep-ocean dive 3000’ feet down; to an ancient kingdom entirely of her own invention; to a burn unit on the Jovian moon Callisto. It takes her beyond the human to squids, lichens, a Thai elephant orchestra, and the life of the earth’s first cell. What the poems bring back from all these journeys would do the Royal Explorers Club proud.

By bringing to her poems a serious knowledge of archeology, history and the sciences — especially earth science and animal behavior — Sarah is colonizing fresh experience for poetry. Her poems are not only beautiful and moving, with a mischievous sense of humor. They are also important: This poetry is increasing the footprint of the art form. If any of you were in college as long ago as I was, you may recall a widely-read little book by C.P. Snow called The Two Cultures. In it he recognized and deplored the split of our intellectual life into two cultures that do not speak to each other: the sciences and the humanities. Were Lord Snow with us today to hear Sarah’s poems, he would be pleased.

Lindsay has published her poems in books with Grove Press and with Copper Canyon Press. It’s hard to call her unrecognized: A National Book Award finalist; a Lannan Literary Fellowship; the Carolyn Kizer Prize and Pushcart Prize, among others; and publication in a pantheon of literary magazines. It may be hard to call her unrecognized, but it’s easy to say we hope the poetry gods are listening.

Origin

The first cell felt no call to divide.
Fed on abundant salts and sun,
still thin, it simply spread,
rocking on water, clinging to stone,
a film of obliging strength.
Its endoplasmic reticulum
was a thing of incomparable curvaceous length;
its nucleus, Golgi apparatus, R N A
magnificent. With no incidence
of loneliness, inner conflict, or deceit,
no predator or prey,
it had little to do but thrive,
draw back from any sharp heat
or bitterness, and change its pastel
colors in a kind of song.
We are descendants of the second cell.

Sarah Lindsay

In a letter written in April 1922 the poet Hart Crane posed a question to a friend: “Will radios, flying machines, and cinemas have such a great effect on poetry in the end?” He was questioning the infatuation of the early Modernist writers then emerging with “the latest thing,” and wrestling with it in his own poetry. (1922 saw Joyce publish Ulysses and Eliot “The Waste Land”.)

It was a good question then, and still is. In the century that followed, the explosion of new technologies and science has kept the question before us. How do poets today deal with an ancient moon that shares the sky with satellites in transit? How do they deal with the Red Shift, black holes, a universe of dark matter that we can’t see? With DNA and the double helix that determines the nature of all life?

I think the poets will capture and express the new realities with the same tools they have always used: imagination and the language. They will take it in stride. Imagination goes where understanding stops and cannot go. In this excerpt from her poem “Look Again” see how Sarah Lindsay accepts the realities beyond the reach of our senses and brings it back where all poems must end: what it means to be human.

I know how little I know
from observation…

that my eyes are too slow
to track shooting stars, too quick
to spy continental drift,
and earth conceals its spin
by spinning me with it,

that a tree won’t let me
see its growth, only its height,
that hairs on my head go singly gray
only by night.

The first law of language is that there are no laws of language. The laws of language are not the laws of the dictionary. Dictionaries should not decree (except in Scrabble), they should track and report. A dictionary should be an agora where users can meet and find common ground on how a word can be used in light of its origins, the history of its usage, the evolution of its meaning. A dictionary deals in denotations, not connotations. But connotations steer the future course of the word; connotations eventually become denotations.

Poets go beyond denotations to consider a word in its full colorations: etymology, yes, but also its connotations, both public and personal to the poet. And the word as a unit of sound: its rhythm, sonority, how its consonants and vowels work together. A word is a social contract between the user of the moment and all users who preceded. Poets amend or even break the social contract. They extend the reach of the word to encompass and express the new reality of the present. Not just poets, so do doctors and engineers. (“The fingers of the surgeon search the body’s landmarks for the first incision.”). Poets do this consciously. The liberties they take are not countenanced by the dictionary. It is creative destruction.

A language is like a sea of pack ice: solid and motionless to the eye, but prone to drift under pressure and always in subtle motion.

In the spirit of ongoing gratitude, I’m sharing with you a poem from my latest collection, The Boxer of Quirinal, as well as my personal reflection on the poem.

Just as Emily Dickinson wrote, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” I hope that this poem takes the top of your head off — metaphorically, of course!

Eight Minutes Out

Like a ringmaster in the center ring
he keeps the planets circling perfectly;
the comets he allows to have their fling
but brings them back precisely on the day;
the asteroids trumpet and kneel on cue
while all the while he sends his radiance
to neighbor stars, across the Milky Way,
and on into the boundless provenance.

Hardly important — even worth noticing,
if a sliver of his bounty, minutes out,
barely 90 million miles away,
should in its last ten feet change anything — 
even if extracting life from light,
a green exception to a winter’s day.

Commentary on Eight Minutes Out

Extracting life from light is a miracle. Chlorophyll has turned the planet green. Without it there would be no plant or animal life. Every feeding chain starts with it — except that some forms of life do not depend on chlorophyll.

How a poet writes poems: To repeat the phrase from Hemingway, it’s always the same and always different. In the fall of 1988, driving home from Vermont, I learned just how different. After 20 years of writing (or learning to write) poems in conventional lyric forms, an unknown voice in my head spoke a line of poetry — in a Caribbean patois. Having learned not to ask questions, I pulled my Jeep off the road and wrote it down. In the weeks following this voice continued to comment (rather relentlessly, on airplanes, in taxis, at two in the morning) on everything in my daily world. The accumulating lines produced poems:

O₂ O₂

Iron, he is steel, he good for the auto hood,
resisting crumple when the eye averted from the car ahead,
but iron, like a dog always ready to run off,
want to change and particle to rust. He yearn to be ore.

Copper no better. Try as he might he can’t hold
that salmon shine. Athwart the salad air,
lichen and liverspot, he grow green.
Except for Ibn’s elbow grease and his dissuadin’ Brasso,
copper nothin’ but a throatful of oxide.

De world full of lively elements.
Him water wear and roll, till a stream bed’s
boulders nothin’ but a bed of robin’s eggs.
Him water get a grip in a nevermind of gneiss — 
the tiniest fissure — and watch him freeze and fracture
granite like a mouse skull in an owl’s claw.

Air, don’t mention it. Little methane, little argon,
and ozone — oh yes, O₃ dat necessary radical.
But in de midst of all dem jump-down, spin-around
heptagonals come de ransacker name of O₂,
de Great White lookin’ for de big score.
O₂ spider lover of metals
O₂ procuress for fire
O₂ de hunger in Quine d’Rodéo’s lungs.

Ibn Opcit, the poet/gardener, my persona or alter ego, went on speaking for several years and several thousand lines in my journals. When I set out to turn all this into a long poem or book, I again didn’t follow the rules. In “The Figure a Poem Makes” Frost admonishes “It is but a trick poem and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the last.” That’s true of writing a lyric poem but this would be a long narrative poem, and I would tell the story using lines from the journals written at other times for other occasions. The lines of the poem would be like the different colored stones used by an artisan to compose a mosaic on a chapel ceiling. In 1999 Grace was published as a book-length poem. Billy Collins called the mock epic “a momentous feat, a kind of funky Finnegan’s Wake in verse with palm trees.” In 2013 it was republished with a sequel, Opcit at Large, as The Adventures of Ibn Opcit.

About making love Hemingway said, “It’s always the same but always different.” Poets might say the same about how they write.

I carry with me 3X5 cards to write down a line when it comes unannounced. Capturing those fugitive lines matters because they don’t last long.

Once, in a movie theater, a line came, and I wrote it down even though I couldn’t see in the dark. When I got home the card was blank: I had written with the wrong end of the pen. Like Mickey Spillane at a crime scene, I shaded the impression with a pencil, and that lost line eventually made it into a poem.

When the cards pile up I copy them into journal books, which, in my case, go back to 1986 (although I was writing, or learning to write, poems 20 years before that). But the journals are more than a repository. In Part 2 of this essay, I’ll explain how.

If a line feels like it could turn into a poem I start a file of drafts. In a couple of drawers like this one, the history of each poem comes to rest.

Mss

Since I start things on the margin
 — cocktail napkins, cancelled checks,
timetables trying to be reliable — 
and since I save it all, I know
there are good words buried and lost
in those fat accordion files, words
that sounded good at the time,
that I promised to get back to,
rhyme trains that never left Grand Central,
monikers that chattered like silverware
at 30,000’, sounds struck
sheer of sense — coin of a realm — 
from a currency of air, pronounced
like blessings on an express world,
soul puffs, plain mistakes,
angels, working definitions of.