Back when I was your age and had much too much time on my hands, I was ambitious to be a poet and even went so far as to write a few poems and send them away to magazines, double-spaced, with a stamped envelope. The poems were full of passionate obscurity; they veered between whimsy and nihilism; and they sounded like bad translations of, say, a gloomy Swede who’d never left Göteborg, and yet, being 21 and confident of my calling, I felt validated by the magazines’ rejection of them and could have gone on writing the stuff for years and years. What killed my career was encouragement. I wrote a poem called “Crucifixion” and a friend of mine (himself a poet) wrote me a letter praising it that only made me see how cheap and fraudulent it was and I didn’t want to be that kind of fake. I made a simple moral decision: it is probably better to imitate humor than portentous despair. I quit cold turkey. Aside from the occasional limerick for somebody’s birthday, I’ve been clean ever since. 

     As a grad student in English, I wrote long, heavily ornamented, semi-intelligible papers about Milton and Yeats and Matthew Arnold whose sheer density amazes me today. (The writer of those papers knew less about life than Einstein knew about the Delta blues.) But my most intense and authentic experience of poetry was stealing the Oxford Anthology of Verse from Dayton’s department store in downtown Minneapolis when I was 16. It was a lovely big book and I opened it, inhaled the pages, let temptation burgeon and simmer, and since the Dayton’s sales personnel were occupied with Christmas customers, I stuffed the book under my jacket and walked out on Eighth Street and turned right, toward Hennepin, and thought, You should go to jail for this, and walked along at a good clip, half-expecting a big claw to clamp on to my shoulder. I hid the book in my bedroom and concocted a story about a kind stranger who had given it to me (“Here, son. Once when I was your age, a man gave me a book of poems that changed my life, and now I am repeating the favor.”), which seemed pretty flimsy, and then I got an inspiration. I gave the book to Dad for Christmas. He was surprised: a rather opulent gift from a kid on a small allowance. Dad was a railway mail clerk and carpenter and his taste in poetry ran toward Longfellow, toward hymns and exhortations to faith and to labor, and it stopped short at the door of modernism. Dad was not a questioner of the faith and he had no time for skeptics and when he saw how much skepticism there was in the Oxford Anthology he abandoned it and it migrated to my room. I lay up there, reading Frost and Cummings and Sandburg and Eliot, stolen pleasures to me now, for which I had risked arrest, prosecution, a year in the reformatory at Red Wing, shame to my family, the end of my hopes of college, the beginning of a lifetime of menial jobs. I had risked all of that, just as the boy in Frost’s poem risks life and limb to swing on the birch tree. Just as Adam and Eve ate from the apple in disobedience to Divine instruction—a necessary sin, humankind not meant to remain as children in the nursery Garden but meant by God to live real lives.

     That was my last theft. (You only need to bite the apple once.) A few years later, I made restitution to the Daytons, a good Presbyterian clan whose beneficence to the community was well known. I came to love that book that I had risked so much for and taken my conscience into my own hands. Poetry is a necessity as simple as the need to be touched and similarly a need that is hard to enunciate. The intense vision and high spirits and moral grandeur are simply needed lest we drift through our days consumed by clothing options and hair styling and whether to have the soup or the salad.

     The meaning of poetry is to give courage. A poem is not a puzzle that you the dutiful reader are obliged to solve. It is meant to poke you, get you to buck up, pay attention, rise and shine, look alive, get a grip, get the picture, pull up your socks, wake up and die right. Poets have many motives for writing (to be published on expensive paper, to show up the others in your M.F.A. program, to flaunt your sensitive nature and thereby impress someone who might then go to bed with you, to win valuable prizes and fellowships and maybe a year in Rome or Provence, to have a plausible excuse for making a mess of your life), but what really matters about poetry and what distinguishes poets from, say, fashion models or ad salesmen is the miracle of incantation in rendering the gravity and grace and beauty of the ordinary world and thereby lending courage to strangers. This is a necessary thing. At times life becomes almost impossible, and you curl up under a blanket in a dim room behind drawn shades and you despise your life, which seems mean and purposeless, a hoax and a cheat, your shining chances all wasted, pissed away, nobody can change this or make this better, love is lost, hope gone, nothing left but to pour a glass of gin and listen to weepy music. But it can help to say words. Moaning helps. So does prayer. God hears prayer and restores the souls of the faithful. Walking helps. Many people have pulled themselves up out of the pit by the simple expedient of rising to their feet, leaning slightly forward, and putting one foot ahead of the other. Poems help. In Mrs. Fleischman’s eleventh-grade English class, my assignment was to memorize Shakespeare’s sonnet “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,” and so I did, and having it in my head for forty years has brought me many moments of clarity, and also Housman’s “Loveliest of trees the cherry now,” and “A Blessing” by James Wright, and “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver (both in Good Poems, the predecessor to this book) and other poems. They don’t come to me in moments of hilarity, but often when feeling bereft or drowning in work or even just being late to an appointment, stuck in traffic, ranting at myself, Wright’s two Indian ponies have come to me, their eyes full of kindness, Oliver’s geese have honked, Shakespeare’s lark at break of day from sullen earth arises, the heart is calmed, the gnashing stops, and one goes on.

     America is in hard times these days, the beloved country awash to the scuppers in expensive trash, gripped by persistent jitters, politics even more divorced from reality than usual, the levers of power firmly in the hands of a cadre of Christian pirates and bullies whose cynicism is stunning, especially their perversion of the gospel of the Lord to blast the poor and the meek and subvert the tax system in favor of the rich, while public institutions are put into perpetual fiscal crisis, meanwhile newspapers dwindle in sad decline, journalism is lost in the whirlwind of amusement, and the hairy hand of the censor reaches out—what mustn’t be lost, in this dank time, is the passion of young people for truth and justice and liberty—the spirit that has kept the American porch light lit through dark ages of history—and when this spirit is betrayed by the timid and the greedy and the naive, then we must depend on the poets. American poetry is the truest journalism we have. What your life can be, lived bravely and independently, you can discover in poetry.

     People complain about the obscurity of poetry, especially if they’re assigned to write about it, but actually poetry is rather straightforward compared to ordinary conversation with people you don’t know well, which tends to be jumpy repartee, crooked, coded, allusive to no effect, firmly repressed, locked up in irony, steadfastly refusing to share genuine experience—think of conversation at office parties or conversation between teenage children and parents, or between teenagers themselves, or between men, or between bitter spouses: rarely in ordinary conversation do people speak from the heart and mean what they say. How often in the past week did anyone offer you something from the heart? It’s there in poetry. Forget everything you ever read about poetry, it doesn’t matter—poetry is the last preserve of honest speech and the outspoken heart. All that I wrote about it as a grad student I hereby recant and abjure—all that matters about poetry to me now is directness and clarity and truthfulness. All that is twittery and lit’ry: no thanks, pal. A person could perish of entertainment, especially comedy, so much of it casually nihilistic, hateful, glittering, cold, and in the end clueless. People in nursing homes die watching late-night television and if I were one of them, I’d be grateful when the darkness descends. Thank God if the pastor comes and offers a psalm and a prayer, and they can attain a glimmer of clarity at the end.

     My dad and I were as different as could be (I made sure of that), but his life had a clarity that I find in poetry. He was a carpenter, and if I close my eyes, I can see him, thirtyish, handsome, sawdust in his dark hair, running a 2×4 through a circular saw, trimming it, holding it up to the studs, pulling a nail out from between his front teeth, taking the hammer from the loop on his pants where it hung, and pounding in the nail, three whacks, and a tap for good luck. This simple act, repeated a thousand times as he built the house up over our heads, had the cadence and fervor of poetry. He didn’t earn his daily bread sitting in a conference room, manipulating people, moving big wads of cash around, spinning a web of hogwash: compared to that, his life was poetry. When he bowed his head and gave thanks before a meal, it was always the same words, the same cadence. When he took a chicken by the legs and laid its neck against the block and lifted the ax and chopped off its head, there was a plain cadence to that. I hear that whack in poetry. Comedians are the children at the upstairs window, amused by the hysteria of chickens trying to escape over the fence, waiting for the hammerer to pound his thumb so they can imitate his pain, hop around and howl. Comedy is a predatory sport, closer to the lynch mob than to church. Poetry is church. What animates poetry is faith, the same faith that moves the builder and the butcher. My dad died in the first-floor bedroom of the house he built and his death had a plain cadence to it. When I brought my three-year-old daughter to see him two weeks before he died, he wriggled his toes under the blanket to make her reach for them and then he withdrew them to make her giggle. He had been making children giggle all his life. His voice and the heat of his life can be found in poetry and nowhere else: poetry is about driving the nail into the pine, killing the chicken, mowing grass, putting luggage into the car, gratitude for food, the laughter of a little girl, about our common life.

     The common life is precarious. I fear a future in which America becomes a loose aggregate of marauding tribes—no binding traditions, no songs that we all know, not even “The Star-Spangled Banner” or “Silent Night,” no common heroes, no American literature—only the promotional lit of race and ethnicity, our people unable to name their senators, their only political experience via television, their only public life at Wal-Mart. There are no more TV shows that everyone knows: 10 percent of audience is a huge hit. The last singer recognizable to everyone was Frank Sinatra, the last poet known far and wide was Robert Frost. There are no replacements in sight. Today’s celebrities are people whom most Americans haven’t heard of. Our culture—jazz, especially, and movies—once united us, a point of pride, uniquely American, but school boards are slaughtering arts education on every hand—programs are dead or dying that used to bus kids to hear an orchestra or see a play—children are cheated out of poetry and French and the cello—meanwhile, interscholastic football, the great passion of unhappy men, grows by leaps and bounds, and children are conditioned for the passive life in which commercial trademarks become their insignia here in the United Corporations of America. You lie in a hotel bed at night, remote in hand and surf a hundred channels of television, Weather, Golf, History, Shopping, Food, Disney, Rerun, Rerun 2 and 3, Cartoons, Movie, News, Fox News, and you can drift for hours among the flotsam and you will never see anything that shows that you’re in Knoxville or Seattle or Santa Fe or Chicago and nobody will ever speak to you as straightforwardly and clearly as poetry does. Nobody. They don’t even try. You can lie in that bed for a week, getting sicker and sicker, waiting to hear one daring and heartfelt word, and it will not come. Everything is slicker than catshit in the moonlight, the clammy sincerity of anchor persons, the shallow knowingness on all sides, the beloved sheepdip of commercials, the clumsy cunning of politicians, incessant flacking and spinning and winking and preening and strutting, but if you’re looking for plain passionate speech, you won’t find it there—now and then, on a soap opera, a character may utter a meaningful line (“Why can’t you let me love you, Richard?”) and sometimes a preacher comes out with a good thought (“Think not of the morrow.”) but television is a product, not a medium, and everything you see and hear is produced by people terrified that they might be banished from the castle tomorrow and lose their limos and expense-account lunches and become peasants again, so there is mighty little courage or playfulness, as there is in poetry, which is entirely created by peasants, every word. Banishment is a way of life for poets, so what’s to be afraid of?

     Poetry is free speech. It is ever on the side of the irrepressible spirit and in opposition to the censor, to Management, to the protocols of the company psychologist, to the roomful of men in blue suits who casually cheat schoolchildren. It is on the side of exhilaration and the stupendous vision, the sight of the stars through the barred window, the perfection of small birds, the democracy of their chittering language and of our own yakfest and hullabaloo. Poetry is made of the grandeur that is available to a man with no fortune but with somewhere to walk to and ears to hear and a mind to transport him. He may be defeated in love and finance and yet the night belongs to him, he feels entrusted with the stunning sky, the guardian of the houses on the street and all the people in them. So are poets, the angels and shepherds of the sleeping world.

     The intensity of poetry, its imaginative fervor, its cadences, is not meant for the triumphant executive, but for people in a jam—you and me. Remember the last time you hitchhiked and stood, thumb out, as the cars whooshed past, waiting for the kind stranger, focusing on each pair of oncoming headlights and thinking, I am not a killer. I won’t weird you out. I am actually extremely nice. I am a student in college. I really need you to stop and give me a ride. Then your hitchhiking days were over. You graduated. You got a good job, a car, a family, a house, a church, you salted away some dough. And then trouble struck. (Sirens, klaxons, cries of alarm.) And now, damn it, you are (figuratively) right back out there on the highway, except now it’s raining. Maybe your good job went up in smoke. Perhaps your assets have been turned to succotash by a lousy investment in an old warehouse you meant to convert to fashionable shops and ethnic restaurants, which you halfway did and then it went belly up, there being too many such warehouses in your town, and an accountant in a blue-striped shirt gives you the plain bad news, and now you may lose your lovely old 1910 manse under the elms with the bay window and curved veranda on the big corner lot in Crocus Hill, and now you must scrabble your way back up the slippery slope again, but you’re older and less steady and your heart sinks at the prospect of having to grind out a living again. Perhaps you have gotten a terrible phone call from your beautiful faraway child—liver cancer? How can a kid get liver cancer? She’s 34 and lovely and exercises daily and never drank or smoked!—and now your good life is upheaved, time is stopped and the calendar canceled, and you’re off on the plane to a hospital drama in a strange city. Perhaps your brother, the one you’ve worried about for twenty years, has finally gone careening off the road at 3 A.M. and totaled his car and is still firmly in denial that his drinking must now be discussed though his wife is in torment and his children wary and confused and you must face him and be the recipient of his stupid anger. These troubles come to people all the time.—Perhaps you are foundering on work and no help is at hand. Me, too.—Perhaps you are imprisoned in a character you created for yourself who seemed smart and cheerful and virtuous and now feels like a wooden costume, heavy, clunky.—Perhaps you have been banged around by various events and are a little, how shall we say, oysgeshpilt, and need something to make sense.—Perhaps you have sat in a doctor’s office listening to his spiel about leakage in the mitral valve and congestive heart disease and suddenly realized bwannggg this is your mitral valve under discussion and you are headed for a scary ride down the canyon toward surgery. A stranger will shave your private areas and anoint you with antiseptic and slide you onto a gurney and you’ll be wheeled into a chilly room with bright overhead lights and a kind lady will begin telling you about anesthesia as one would explain darkness to a small child.

     This is a book of poems that if I knew you better and if you were in a hard passage I might send you one or two of along with a note, the way people used to do, believing in the bracing effect of bold writing. Whether you stole the book, bought it used or remaindered, found it on the bus, got it from your son for Christmas, I hope it does you some good. That was the reason for putting the poems together. These poems describe a common life. It is good to know about this. I hope you take courage from it.