Cosmopoetica

We’re mostly hydrogen which means we’re mostly empty space. A scale model of a hydrogen atom with a 1-inch thick nucleus would enclose an almost completely empty sphere with a diameter of more than a mile. A scale model of our need with ourselves at the center would enclose a space greater than the blast radius of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings combined.

More than sixty-trillion neutrinos spin off the solar wash from our sun each second, passing through the empty space in our mostly-hydrogen selves leaving the emptiness unchanged. I think of you every second and my humors reconfigure themselves, leaving me just what I was before, but different; just what I’ll become, but the same.

There’s a deeper mechanics that can explain the spooky dance and spin, how from different directions one turn affects the other, one reach acts as two, and how we can move forward and back in time, without touching.

There’s a book somewhere in the infinite library where all of this has already been written, illustrated with a periodic table where 1 is I, 2 is You, and 3 has to be We.

There’s a calculus I can’t calculate in this convergence to a single point, the equations marked by strange symbols I can’t quite decipher, one which looks like an unknown sum, another a fraction, a third that stands-in for dust.

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The Storialist features a new poem each work day inspired by (and linking to) a photograph or work of art found on the web. Good idea and some great poems. Check it out.

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Imagine the heart as a great spinning cylindrical habitat catapulting through deep space, home world forgotten, destination never known. The people living inside don’t feel as if they’re clinging to the thinnest skin when they walk. They can’t dig deep enough with their tiny hands to approach the bedrock of steel. But even with their primitive instruments they sense their heat disappearing, they intuit their own cooling, and from that derive a complex system of metaphysical entropy. They’re used to the sight of hazy lands curving across the sky, the rainbow arch of rivers over their heads, that nothing falls.

In the heart world’s mythology, the enlightened rise so high their nascent wings appear. Slipping spinward, the pain is enormous. They rise toward something like the sun. Left behind: first birth. Ahead: the crash and cacophony of a world on the other side of dreams. In between: the coriolis and the craving and the falling in every direction.

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“detective or mystery convention is of course the group exposition scene at the end, in which the detective tells a gathered group, often including the culprit, what happened. If addressed to the criminal, it’s in the second person, informing the criminal of her/his own biography. The same convention is used in contemporary poetry—informing some “you” of her/his own life. No wonder it sounds accusatory.”

–Alice Fulton
notebook entry, 8/22/92

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“…noise is not only incidental, but essential to communication. … If, for example, a letter is written in careless or illegible script, there is interference in the reading process, which is to say that noise slows down communication.”

–Marjorie Perloff
from Radical Artifice

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I’ve been angry as long as I can remember. Angry at my fathers– biological, adopted, and step– for not being there and for being there. Angry at my mother for foisting those fathers on me and for having me in the first place. Angry at my children because I had no choice but to fail them. Angry at my life for forcing me to live it.

I threw things. I hit people. When I was nine I broke a knuckle and a small bone in my hand punching a wall. Fifteen years later I would become re-acquainted with other children I’d known at the time who remembered little about me except how I’d terrorized the neighborhood using that cast as a club.

The basketball player tossing the folding chair at his coach? That was me. The angry kid taking his dad’s shotgun fully intending to shoot his bullying uncle? That was me too. The madman on the bicycle chasing down the car with the inattentive driver and pounding on it with his bicycle pump? You guessed it.

My anger’s consumed me without hesitation. It’s eaten my life, leaving emptiness behind. It’s never satiated. And as much as I’ve hated my anger, for the most part I’ve loved it. Romanced it. I created a personal mythology in which my sourceless, ceaseless anger was my burning heart, my lust for life, an ambitious appetite… when it was at best a cooling ember, slowly turning black but still possessing unspeakable heat.

The mechanics of anger– the selfish, one-sided blindness of it– make it finally unsuitable for anything except manufacturing more anger. Anger is massless, not subject to the normal rules of the universe in which expending energy must necessarily lessen the energy of that from which it comes. The muse borne of anger is hollow. The improvements that come from it uninspired.

The consistent, enduring relic of anger– the ruin it leaves behind– is shame. What do I do with the knowledge that I stood over my second born’s crib and fitted my hand to his tiny nose and mouth, seriously contemplating smothering him? What do I do with the silence up until my father’s death that can never be broken? And what of the same silence between myself and his father for so many year before he died, a man who showed me nothing but love; a man who on his deathbed remembered me– me– as a "sweet little boy?" What do I do now, knowing that my children have lived their life terrified of me and my disapproval, in fear of my bullying? What choices do I have when I can’t honestly claim to be much better than my own despised fathers?

I work to subdue my anger, to bury its radioactive mass as deeply as I can beneath layers of action and confession. But it remains, as toxic as ever, threatening everything I draw close to, its half-life many times longer than the time I have left to work through the complicated calculus that governs it and its sole antimatter: love.

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As a quick glance over this blog (or Ruminate) will make clear, I’ve yet to figure out the forms that are my own best fit for blog writing. I feel intuitively that there’s an undiscovered, Platonic form out there in the hazy region where prose poems, free-form essays, and micro-fictions live– something sinewy and interconnected, something satisfying on the screen but still significant– that I could settle comfortably into.

My intuition might simply be confusion. I strongly believe the features of the "Read/Write Web"– lightweight publishing mechanisms, reputation systems, space for commentary, and the hidden plumbing of web feeds– hold an inconceivable amount of promise to rehabilitate, renew and advance those three forms (which are increasingly difficult to distinguish from one another): prose poems, flash fiction, and brief essays. The last seems particularly fit for the medium. When Montaigne first used the term "essai" he did so with its literal meaning in mind, intending that what he was writing was an "attempt" at writing something new, in a new way. Where prose poetry and flash fiction inherently tend toward being small, highly polished jewels, there’s a healthy strand of essays that retain a kind of ragged, informal glory.

Isn’t the world of blogs and wikis a perfect one in which to return to the principles of essays as assays? The new essai could be a form uniquely suited to the prosumer, enthusiast nature of the net.

I’m not talking about creating more actual links or an increase in explicit, technologically assisted hypertextuality. Those aspects of the media interest me, but less than the general idea of form in individual posts and then how those posts create aggregate forms, both intentional and those that coalesce serendipitously through the actions of users browsing and searching as well as by virtue of technological elements such as tags and categories.

I’ve been thinking about this subconsciously for a while, but with more attention as I brainstormed my latest mini-project: for the rest of March I’ll be writing an abecedarium of sorts– 26 essais from A-Z– that live somewhere in that interstitial space between, and encroaching upon, prose poems and "in short" creative nonfiction.

While not exactly what I have in mind, I was inspired by Priscilla Long’s "My Brain On My Mind," a fantastic piece about the brain’s workings, memory, and cognition told through the lens of the story of her grandfather… in the form of an abecedarium.

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My father lifted me from my bed and carried me through the smoke. I remember the smell of a campfire, a burn barrel, burning hair. I could smell the faded scent of my father’s cologne, and feel how solid he was. I wasn’t scared… in his arms nothing could touch me.

And then we were outside. From the back seat of my grandfather’s car I could see my father standing at the edge of the yard, silhouetted by the flames. He stood with one leg slightly in front of the other, right arm stiff across his body, holding that elbow in his left hand… a posture I find myself quietly assuming today. The flames had turned the snow all around an alien orange. I thought the flames capable of anything and, worried they would snatch him away, I strained toward the rear window to reach him.

A few days later we picked through the remains of the house. There were footprints frozen in the runoff from the firefighting and the snow melt. Everything had burned. We wandered around the skeletal remains of the hide-a-bed, stripped but still standing on all fours, and the frame of the stand that held the fish tank before it boiled and burst into watery shards. Nothing remained worth carrying away except my father’s bronzed baby shoes, now soot black.

Twenty years later my father too would burn, making permanent a decade-long silence between us. I can’t remember his face from that first fire or any that followed. When I try to recall his face I can see the way he tilted his head when he talked and how he worked his jaw nervously, but I can picture nothing of his features. Based on my memory the best sketch artist would produce an unrecognizable ghost.

My father would die young with a cigarette in his hand, the nearly full-length of ash unbroken. He’d die just a few years older than I am now. He’d die in a room in his mother’s house, a boy who never fully became a man. He’d die without a sound.

My father would die leaving nothing with me but a legacy that touches on everything in me. The tiny bronzed baby shoes are a buried curiosity now, lost in a landfill, awaiting reconstruction in some future age people by strangers for whom my angry father and his angry son, the decades of and between the burning– all the waste and wreckage, the wrack and ruin– will be indistinguishable, will be disembodied data, will be dots on a grid so close together they may as well be one, may as well be nothing at all.

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[CC licensed image by draggin] 

Despite suffering from a lack of focus (or an essential pointlessness… take your pick), false analogies, and that old-man odor and monochromatic hue that comes with too much time inside the “Golden Age” fallacy, David Alpaugh’s article “The New Math of Poetry” is worth a few quick minutes of any poetry reader’s or writer’s time.

For the poetry reader, Alpaugh’s article represents a common paradox: he at once bemoans the lack of gatekeepers that we had in the good old days while bewailing the efforts of those very kind of gatekeepers in the modern, leaden era. It seems to me that Alpaugh’s thesis of a sea of mediocrity is belied by a bit of simple browsing. It’s not hard to find good writing… and not that much harder to find great writing.

Sure, it’s easy at the library—or even the stacks of your nearest chain bookstore—to find great writing from the past, because the effects of time and limits on shelf space have contributed to a winnowing that has resulted in the small set we see on the shelves. If Alpaugh thinks the filtering through publishing was effective X number of years ago, he ought to visit a library or collection that truly reflects what was published and shared in that time… I’ll bet dollars to donuts that he’ll find then, as now, that Sturgeon’s Law was true and reflected clearly in what was published.

For the poetry writer—actually for one who wants to publish, since the two activities aren’t absolutely intertwined—it’s a common (but I think easily solved) dilemma. We can mourn the passing of artificially, extremely limited channels of publication… or we can undertake to participate in a new model based on a culture of abundance. The latter demands that we first question what the point of publishing is: to reach readers or for some kind of cachet, whether cultural or academic? Do you want readers, or do you want entries on your vitae? Do you want to write or simply be known as a writer?

If the answer is to reach readers, then (the first steps of) the solution are obvious: stop trying to publish within the new mechanism as if one is inside the old. Stop “publishing” with the idea in mind of one-off, static publications that appear slowly and disappear quickly. Think instead of participating in your publication, allowing for (and responding to) comments, creating anthologies and remixes, and publishing and promoting the work of others alongside your own. If you publish in traditional outlets, ask for the right to publish to the web using a Creative Commons license—simultaneously or later. Create a presence through social networks and social media to get the word out about your work and, more importantly, to facilitate (mostly incidental) promotion of your work by others. It’s not rocket science, it’s diligence.

There’s no question that there’s a lot of bad writing out there. The proportion of bad writing to good writing is arguably the same; the sheer volume is inarguably greater. But Alpaugh doesn’t seem to recognize that filtering systems have also evolved. When I say that it’s easy to find good poetry with a bit of browsing, I’m not referring to searching Google for the word poetry. I’m talking about being a participant in the vibrant and constantly growing poetry “infosphere,” which sets into motion mechanisms of reputation and referral not unlike what is still the most reliable way to discover great poetry: word of mouth. I can find good poetry any time by seeing what poems are being touted and Twittered and what publications are being fondled and Facebooked. A web feed reader allows me to quickly identify the work that is being loved and linked within a vast network of blogs of all kinds (those of writers, those of readers, those of collectors) by people interested in poetry from the ancient to the avant garde. The key in this new world is participation, not continuing a tradition of passivity.

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[CC licensed image by darkpatator]

Eighteen months ago– a day after his suicide– I packed up every David Foster Wallace authored book, every journal, magazine, and photocopied piece of ephemera he appeared in, and everything else I could find with his byline and hid it all in a closet.

A few days ago– on what would have been Wallace’s 48th birthday– I told a friend how I still hadn’t been able to re-read anything Wallace had written. “Open that box. Like, now,” she said. And since I trust this friend, I did. I went back to the first words of Wallace’s I ever read, the short story “Everything is Green.” I immediately noticed the coincidence of the narrator’s age:

(more…)

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“You don’t have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness, both of which are like sub-dreads of our dread of being trapped inside a self (a psychic self, not just a physical self), has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I’m going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me. I’m not sure I could give you a steeple-fingered theoretical justification, but I strongly suspect a big part of real art fiction’s job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it, since any possible human redemption requires us first to face what’s dreadful, what we want to deny.”

–David Foster Wallace

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I met Lucille Clifton in 1990 at a reading I attended with my future wife/mother-of-my-children/ex-wife and a good friend I’d grown up with who was still smarting from the arm twisting I’d given him while convincing him to come along. My friend’s skepticism—part ignorance and part defense mechanism—was typical of young men like us, who had spent too much time growing up stunted by the tiny, anemic towns we lived in. I felt the same knee-jerk skepticism about most things I knew little or nothing about.

At the time, I had no idea who Clifton was. As also often happens with the parochialized when they get a glimpse of the fat world outside their blinders, my ignorance about poetry had by that time turned to nearly uncritical enthusiasm. Writing and reading were on their way to redeeming me, or so I thought. Naturally I assumed the two could do the same for anyone I cared about (that poetry might not be everyone else’s personal Jesus only occurred to me a few years later).

Clifton took over and had the crowd in her pocket within the first two minutes. She shone. She made everyone laugh and gasp and breathe in that slow contemplative breath one takes when someone says something that really makes you think, that makes you lose time for a second while you slowly realize that’s it.

My friend and I were, in different ways, dumbstruck. We weren’t exactly cosmopolitan: the small town we spent many years growing up in had exactly one black family in more than a decade… and they didn’t last long in that environment. Our town was also deeply divided among the racial lines of white and Alaska Native. So to have an older black woman captivate us with poems that included paeans to her hips and poems dedicated to her last period and her uterus was thrilling, amazing, and a little baffling.

I don’t want my description to sound reductive. The “feminine” poems Clifton read were just, for obvious reasons, the ones that challenged our perceptions most obviously. Clifton read poems of many different kinds that night. One of the difficulties of Clifton’s poetry—beyond the apparently simple surface that many readers glance off of—is how much of its life is lost, or at least obscured, without her voice and her generous presence to lift it off the page.

I had a chance to talk to Clifton after the reading. I was too tongue-tied to make much sense and don’t remember exactly how our conversation went except that I said something about wanting to write but not be an “Alaskan poet” (true) in the way she wasn’t a “Black poet” (stupid), to which she laughed and replied “But honey, I am.” And then she gave me some of the best, though not easiest to follow, advice I’ve ever been given: “Just write your poems down. They’ll know who you are… and they’ll tell you.”

I never met Lucille Clifton again. I never thought to thank her until now, when it’s too late. At an important time in my life she provided inspiration to write… and that it was OK to be the kind of writer for whom writing is the act of thinking, that it’s OK not to be sure where I am going when I start and to let the poems tell me where I’ve been. Clifton bears no responsibility for the bad poems I’ve written since, but she surely deserves some credit for the bit of good in me that has come about because of writing them.

And my aching-armed, non-poetry-reading friend? In the space of that hour or so he grew into that rarest of creatures: one who reads poetry with no desire to write any himself.

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I know this comment was a compliment… yet it illustrates the fundamental divide in the person I once was (and want to be again) and the person I’ve become, despite my efforts. No poetry.

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[CC licensed image by ajawin] 

Last year I was browsing the blogs and came across an entry, since lost, in which the author described her regular practice of writing "charming notes" to writers she admired, thanking them in some way for their work. Feeling the idea intersected nicely with burgeoning themes in my own life, I came back to this idea late last Fall and discovered that the practice described by my fellow unknown blogger originated in a book called Making a Literary Life by Carolyn See, which I promptly purchased.

I’ve only skimmed Making a Literary Life but, unlike most books that purpose to give advice on writing and being a writer (the list of such titles I think are worth the raw price of the paper they are printed on is very short), See’s book fits right in a sweet spot for me: a book more about being a creative than one giving traditional writerly advice. I’ll return to it before too long.

In the meantime, See’s recommendation for "charming notes" is pretty simple:

• Write a short note thanking an author every day.

• Don’t ask for anything in the notes… you aren’t "networking" (sadly, as I was searching for more information I found many people conveniently forget this part).

• Don’t use art greeting cards or the like– you’re not writing as Picasso but as yourself.

I can’t abide by the every day part of See’s prescription– writing consistently feels more important than writing within a particular time-frame– but the charming notes practice turns out to be good medicine. It feels good to say thanks without any expectation of something in return… which itself fits in nicely with my own regular practice of letter writing in general. And it seems in keeping with being more generous of spirit and recognizing the value and sufficiency of being an attentive and appreciative reader (or viewer, or listener).

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[CC licensed image by Stephen Poff] 

"… Donald Barthelme wrote that "the combinatorial agility of words, the exponential generation of meaning once they’re allowed to go to bed together, allows the writer to surprise himself, makes art possible, reveals how much of Being we haven’t yet encountered." Is there a better one-sentence defense and explanation and manifesto of art? It is combinatorial agility– not just of words, but of sentences, paragraphs, images, objects, events, concepts, and characters- that generates, startles, and reveals.

I’m thinking here of Daisy crying stormily over the shirts that Gatsby tosses onto a table into a soft rich heap. These are shirts, Nick tells us, with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue. "They’re such beautiful shirts," Daisy says, sobbing into their thick folds. "It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such– such beautiful shirts before. "The scene connects a rich guy’s wardrobe and turbulent emotion– beauty and sadness– in a surprising (but not inexplicable or mysterious) causal relationship. Like most literary surprises, Daisy’s reaction to what Nick calls the many-colored disarray seems correct, even inevitable. If Gatsby’s shirts made Daisy speak in tongues or punch Carraway in the gut, we would be surprised, all right, but not convinced or moved.

Or consider Isaac Babel’s "First Love," a story that conjoins delirious desire and genocide, and that contains this sentence: "For five of my ten years I had dreamed with all the fervor of my soul about having doves, and then, when I finally managed to buy them, Makarenko the cripple smashed the doves against the side of my face." Bird and face, peace and violence, passion and pogrom– juxtaposed, smashed, improbably but credibly.

Surprises are, in their effect and regardless of content, instruments of wonder and spirit. A surprise lifts aliveness toward consciousness, where it does not (and cannot) permanently reside. There are many reasons to read literature, of course. One very good reason to read literature is to be surprised. In reading, we perform the nearly oxymoronic feat of seeking surprise."

–Chris Bachelder
found in The Believer, v8 n1 (January 2010)

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[CC licensed image by topshampatti]

The January 2010 issue of Poetry has an interesting “notebook” by Carmine Starnino on “Lazy Bastardism”. Starnino makes a case for difficult poetry… or at least not giving in to notions of making poetry more intelligible for the “ordinary reader” when that market really doesn’t exist and the battle lines are being drawn out in a conflict that is occurring completely inside the heads of poets (the essay is, of course, far more cogent and eloquent than my rushed summary).

My fundamental disappointment with Starnino’s essay is his decision not to cite any specific poets or poems that exemplify this lazy bastardism. He apparently sees such work often enough to feel a need to very publicly note his objection… but where is it? I have some sympathy for Starnino’s argument, as far as I can understand it, but the whole thing is murky and abstract enough that I couldn’t hold up any specific poem as an example.

I must also admit that my first thought upon reading Starnino’s title was that this would be a (justifiable) indictment of the lazy bastardism of writing experimental poetry that is unintelligible and lacking in appreciable craft. In fact, just a few pages later, in the course of a completely unrelated review of Stephen Edgar’s History of the Day, Joshua Mehigan puts his finger right on the pulse of my objection to much “post-avant” poetry:

“The difference between these poems and much difficult contemporary work is that these yield meanings shareable by reader and writer.”

I need that “shareable” meaning. I’m sure many of the admired post-avant writers are quite brilliant… to the ideal reader that exists only in their own heads. The rest of us, including the post-avant’s many vocal admirers, are forced into the position of erecting a structure using the random pieces of building material provided to us (or patching holes in the ramshackle shack we’re offered), a kind of appreciation that is extremely malleable and far too susceptible to cults of personality and aesthetic electioneering.

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“Muses do exist, but now I know that they are not afraid to dirty their hands with explication – that they are patient with truth and commentary as long as it doesn’t get into the poem, that they whisper (if you let yourself really hear them), “Talk all you want, baby, but then let’s go to bed.”

[…]

Are not these poems all things to all men, like Rorschach ink blots or whores? Are they anything better than a kind of mirror?

In themselves, no. Each one of them is a mirror, dedicated to the person that I particularly want to look into it. But mirrors can be arranged. The frightening hall of mirrors in a fun house is universal beyond each particular reflection.

This letter is to you because you are my publisher and because the poem I wrote for you gives the most distorted reflection in the whole promenade. Mirror makers know the secret – one does not make a mirror to resemble a person, one brings a person to the mirror.”

–Jack Spicer
from “First Letter”

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[CC licensed image by a.drian]

As an enthusiastic snail-mail letter writer—you might remember those paper things, physically transported in little paper sleeves with “stamps” on them– Thomas Mallon’s new book Yours Ever: People and Their Letters looks fascinating (as does his earlier book on diaries and journals). An excerpt from the New York Times review:

Think of a letter, Ralph Waldo Emerson urged his daughter, as “a kind of picture of a voice.” Mallon recognizes letters as well to be monuments, marathons, performance art. He neglects neither Ann Landers nor the Unabomber. By way of unexpected detours — Jean Harris turns into the Madame de Sévigné of the prison world — he delivers up epistolary swooning, stroking, wincing, mulling, composting. For the most part the transitions are fluid, but occasionally he makes a jarring turn, swerving, for example, not altogether safely, from Eudora Welty to Thomas Jefferson. But his book is meant to be a ramble, a loose-limbed survey of that forgiving territory where you could safely park your despair, issue a cry from the heart, offer advice, share the ancillary epiphany, exact revenge; where you might be, in short, melancholy, tentative, boastful, sulky, brooding, nuts — emotions for which the letter (and that extinct species, the unsent letter) have always been the perfect medium. “We are most essentially ourselves when frantic and fidgety,” Mallon observes — you can always tell a novelist at 100 yards — and this is a book of shirttails untucked and egos exposed. With good reason “Yours Ever” takes as its hero Charles Lamb, author of “mood-driven miniatures,” precisely what Mallon has knit together here.

Looks like something for my Christmas list (if I can resist ordering it as soon as I hit the “publish” button here).

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I’m an inveterate list-maker and reader of lists. My notebooks are full of lists of various kinds; my otherwise haphazard “productivity” system is based on lists; I love anaphoric poems; found lists are one of my favorite finds inside used-books… so it’s natural that this interview with Umberto Eco charmed me with his discussion of lists of all kinds. Eco makes some interesting observations about lists in literature, considers why we make lists in light of the (practically) infinite bounds of the subjects of many lists, and even ventures into thinking about lists and Google. Good stuff. A few choice bites:

SPIEGEL: But why does Homer list all of those warriors and their ships if he knows that he can never name them all?

Eco: Homer’s work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that. We have always been fascinated by infinite space, by the endless stars and by galaxies upon galaxies. How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn’t have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see. Lovers are in the same position. They experience a deficiency of language, a lack of words to express their feelings. But do lovers ever stop trying to do so? They create lists: Your eyes are so beautiful, and so is your mouth, and your collarbone … One could go into great detail.

SPIEGEL: Why do we waste so much time trying to complete things that can’t be realistically completed?

Eco: We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.

[...]

SPIEGEL: But you also said that lists can establish order. So, do both order and anarchy apply? That would make the Internet, and the lists that the search engine Google creates, prefect for you.

Eco: Yes, in the case of Google, both things do converge. Google makes a list, but the minute I look at my Google-generated list, it has already changed. These lists can be dangerous — not for old people like me, who have acquired their knowledge in another way, but for young people, for whom Google is a tragedy. Schools ought to teach the high art of how to be discriminating.

SPIEGEL: Are you saying that teachers should instruct students on the difference between good and bad? If so, how should they do that?

Eco: Education should return to the way it was in the workshops of the Renaissance…

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As seen on Ed Byrne’s Assemblage:

"Look, a poem either sends you a bill or writes you a check. You can use up too much of your intellectual and emotional capital, not to mention your good will, and come away feeling had. Or you can pat your billfold and say, ‘Hey, this baby just got a little fatter.’

"When I’m asked by fellow air passengers what I do for a living and reply, ‘I write poems,’ the reaction is often a startled smile, as though they’re thinking Homer! Dante! Milton! (At least that’s what I’m thinking they’re thinking.) And then comes the lean-in, the furrowed brow, the voice thick with compassion as my new friend says, ‘But there isn’t any money in that, is there?’

"There are some pretty snappy comebacks to this one, but what I usually offer is Somerset Maugham’s ‘Poetry is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.’ Actually, Maugham says ‘money,’ not ‘poetry,’ but that’s the point. Money and poetry both act as catalysts, and they bring together objects and experiences that wouldn’t have anything to do with one another otherwise. Wealth takes many forms, and sometimes it shows up as stanzas."

–David Kirby in the New York Times Sunday Book Review

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