Introduction
This is not Introduction to Poetry (MWF 9am Chemistry150,3cr) and I am not the Maud Hill Hallowell Professor of Amer ican Lit, and your name isn’t Daphne Foxcroft. It’s simply a book of poems that got read over the radio on a daily five-minute show called The Writer’s Almanac, poems that somehow stuck with me and with some of the listeners. Stickiness, memorability, is one sign of a good poem. You hear it and a day later some of it is still there in the brainpan.
The goodness of a poem is severely tested by reading it on the radio. The radio audience is not the devout sisterhood you find at poetry readings, leaning forward, lips pursed, hanky in hand; it’s more like a high school cafeteria. People listen to poems while they’re frying eggs and sausage and reading the paper and reasoning with their offspring, so I find it wise to stay away from stuff that is too airy or that refers off-handedly to the poet Li-Po or relies on your familiarity with butterflies or Spanish or Monet.
Most listeners are otherwise engaged—we in radio know this; mostly we’re a backdrop to bigger things, like the palace guard in Aida, the surf on the sound machine, a sort of prayer wheel. But sometimes a poem cuts through the static and delivers some good thing. It is of use; it gives value. James Wright’s “A Blessing” was heard by a woman on her Walkman while hustling down a concourse at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport and she stopped to listen to it, though a moment before she had been rushing to catch a plane, and to be interrupted mid-stampede by a beautiful thing is a blessing indeed. Wright’s poem about himself and his friend climbing through barbed wire to visit two horses in a pasture is one that gets read at weddings and memorial services, has been done in needlework and carved into wood, and appears on a brass plaque at an interstate rest stop near Rochester, Minnesota. W. S. Merwin says, “If a poem is not forgotten as soon as the circumstances of its origin, it begins at once to evolve an existence of its own, in minds and lives, and then even in words, that its singular maker could never have imagined.” And so Wright’s poem has: it has made its way in the world, a good poem, and found its way and touched people and been used in ceremonies, as a friendly benediction.
To see poetry finding an existence that its maker never imagined, visit Emily Dickinson’s grave in Amherst. Here lies the whitegowned virgin goddess, in a cluster of Dickinsons, under a stone that says “Called Back,” and here, weekly, strangers come as grieving family, placing pebbles on her big stone, leaving notes to her folded into tiny squares, under small stones. Dickinson was a famous recluse who camped in the shadows in the upstairs hall and eavesdropped on visitors, and now there are few graves in America so venerated as hers. She is mourned continually because the quickness and vitality of her poems make her contemporary, and when you make flies buzz and horses turn their heads and you declaim Wild Nights! Wild Nights! and give hope some feathers, you are going to have friends in this world for as long as English is read.
Oblivion is the writer’s greatest fear, and as with the fear of death, one finds evidence to support it. You fear that your work, the work of your lifetime, on which you labored so unspeakably hard and for which you stood on so many rocky shores and thought, My life has been wasted utterly—your work will have its brief shining moment, the band plays, some confetti is tossed, you are photographed with your family, drinks are served, people squeeze your hand and say that you seem to have lost weight, and then the work languishes in the bookstore and dies and is remaindered and finally entombed on a shelf and—nobody ever looks at it again! Nobody! This happens rather often, actually. Life is intense and the printed page is so faint. Billy Collins wrote (in his poem, “Forgetfulness”):
The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of.
When the reader does not forget, when the reader has even committed the poem to memory and can quote it years later, this is a triumph of large proportions.
What makes a poem memorable is its narrative line. A story is easier to remember than a puzzle. (And there are rules in storytelling that make for a better poem: Stop Mumbling, No Prefaces, Cut to the Chase, Don’t Sound Like a Writer, Be Real.)
Good poems tend to incorporate some story, some cadence or shadow of story. There is a story in Dickinson’s Success is counted sweetest by those who ne‘er succeed and Shakespeare’s When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes and Wright’s Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota/Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass./And the eyes of those two Indian ponies/Darken with kindness and Oliver’s You do not have to be good./You do not have to walk on your knees/For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. And Merwin’s “For the Anniversary of My Death” (Every year without knowing it I have passed the day/When the last fires will wave to me.) You could, without much trouble, commit these poems to memory and have them by heart, like a cello in your head, a portable beauty to steady you and ward off despair.
Raymond Carver said, “Whether I am writing a poem or writing prose, I am still trying to tell a story.” Kenneth Rexroth called on poets to write about “real things that happen to real people” and when a critic referred to him as one of the bearshit-on-the-trail nature poets, Rexroth took it as an honor. Dana Gioia said, “When poets stopped telling stories, they not only lost a substantial portion of their audience; they also narrowed the imaginative possibilities of their art. As long as there have been poets, those poets told stories. Those stories were rarely about their own lives but about imagined lives—drawn from myth, legend, history, or current events.”
I looked at a truckload of poems to find the few thousand I’ve read on the radio, and it’s an education. First of all, most poems aren’t memorable; in fact, they make no impression at all. Sorry, but it’s true. There are brave blurbs on the back cover (“writes with a lyrical luminosity that reconceptualizes experience with cognitive beauty”) but you open up the goods and they’re like condoms on the beach, evidence that somebody was here once and had an experience but not of great interest to the passerby.
Sometimes, however, one is dead wrong. I’ve come to admire writers I once cocked a snoot at, like Raymond Carver and Charles Bukowski. Bukowski said, “There is nothing wrong with poetry that is entertaining and easy to understand. Genius could be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.” This is not what an English major like me cared to hear, back when I was busy writing poems that were lacerating, opaque, complexly layered, unreadable. But now I’m older and I read Bukowski’s love poems, his odes to companionship and city scenes and nightlife, and admire his good humor, e.g., the poem in which he says he’s lived with some fine women in his time but he would rather drive in reverse gear from L.A. to N.Y. than live with any of them again, and I wonder, Why do English teachers offer their prisoners so much Cummings and no Bukowski? Why do standard anthologies include one and never mention the other? Because one of them went to Harvard and had fine manners and lived in the Village, around the corner from the publisher, and the other was a day laborer and roughneck who lived in L.A. and had bad skin and looked like a gargoyle, that’s why.
And then there is T. S. Eliot, the great stuffed owl whose glassy eyes mesmerized the English profs of my day. Eliot was once a cultural icon, the American guy so smooth he passed for British, and when he came to Minneapolis on tour in the midfifties, he practically filled a basketball arena; he was a bigger draw than Frost, Prufrock being required reading in the eleventh grade, but you look at his work today and it seems rather bloodless next to, say, Rexroth’s. Eliot didn’t get out of the house much while Rexroth was dancing all over town. Anybody who would rather read Ash Wednesday than Rexroth’s love poems must be on the take. And yet Rexroth was never mentioned in the halls of the English Department when I was there, nor was Ferlinghetti, that great-hearted, God-gifted man. His City Lights bookstore has always been a mecca in San Francisco. His friend Allen Ginsberg, on the other hand, a good man, admirable in so many ways (especially for Kaddish), was something of a gasbag, not big on rewriting, and reading his Collected Poemsis like hiking across North Dakota. I stopped just beyond Fargo.
I expected to include plenty of Whitman here and discovered, reading him, a sort of seasickness at all those undulating lines of Uncle Walt’s perpetual swoon over grass and leaves and camerados. There are good poems there, and it’s a mistake to omit them, but Walt is the Typhoid Mary of American Lit: so much bad poetry can be traced back to him (and not brief bad poems, either), he gave so many dreadful writers permission to lavish themselves upon us. Lord, forgive me.
Howard Nemerov seems larger and larger to me with each rereading, a kindly giant of great courage and elegance. I admire the industrious and illustrious Auden, the conscientious W. C. Williams. Elizabeth Bishop, William Stafford, Robert Bly: Emily would have perused them with pleasure. Bly is still with us, 75, writing at top form, and this gives hope to the rest of us. It was a rich generation, born in the mid-twenties: Bly and Wright, Simpson, Stern, O‘Hara, Justice, Kumin, Moss, Paley, Sexton, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery. Great men like W. S. Merwin on his palm plantation in Maui, sturdy and cheerful, a writer who has made his own way brilliantly and with great resourcefulness. Donald Hall, still throwing strikes in his old age. My generation of pre-boomers seems light in the loafers compared to the Seniors, a lacrosse team as opposed to the New York Giants, but we do have Carver and Dana Gioia and Billy Collins, the current Poet Laureate and Serene Master and Blissful Poobah, a New York guy who makes people laugh and who teaches literature to welfare mothers, God bless him.
If you read a lot, labels start to seem meaningless. “Regional,” for example, which only means writers whose work might include references to farming, is a useless term. Likewise, “confessional” poetry. And that dreary term, “light verse,” which banishes humor like an insane uncle to the back bedroom. “Women’s lit” strikes me as one of the great dumb ideas to come out of my generation, right up there with multiculturalism. Elizabeth Bishop was a woman, ditto Emily Dickinson, and she can take your head off with one line, too, but if you marshal women writers under one tent, comparisons are inevitable, and the occupants will not be content for long. When you compare Bishop to, say, her friend and mentor Marianne Moore, the mentor pales severely. Marianne Moore was a dotty old aunt whose poems are quite replicable for anyone with a thesaurus. A nice lady, but definitely a plodder, and it would be cruel punishment to have to write a book about her. Her contemporary, Edna St. Vincent Millay, who played the glamorous broad and taxi dancer to Moore’s bunhead librarian, wrote more that is still of interest, whereas Moore’s reputation must be due to the fact that, in the republic of letters, there are many more Moores than Millays. From Millay it’s a straight shot to Anne Sexton, a writer of profound exuberance and wit and a hot number, and her cohort, the beautiful horsekeeper, Maxine Kumin, two women who, forgive me, make St. Sylvia look like tuna salad. Plath is a small dark cloud and Kumin and Sexton are writers you can take anywhere. You could read them at the beach, in blazing sunlight, and your attention would not drift.
What makes Kumin and Sexton matter, and makes all good poems matter, is that they offer a truer account than what we’re used to getting. They surprise us with clear pictures of the familiar. The soft arc of an afternoon in a few lines. Poems that make us love this gaudy, mother-scented, mud-bedaubed language of ours. A cunning low tongue, English, with its rich vocabulary of slander and concupiscence and sport, its fine Latin overlay and French bric-a-brac, and when someone speaks poetry in it, it stirs our little monolingual hearts.
The love of language is the love of truth, and this brings one into conflict with authority, since power employs deceit and is so fond of it—Rexroth said: “The accepted official version of anything is most likely false . . . all authority is based on fraud”—but the love of language is a fundamental connection to our fellows and is a basis of true civility. Stafford wrote:
If you don’t know the kind of person I am
And I don’t knowthe kind of person you are
A pattern that othersmade may prevail in the world
And following the wrong god homewe may missourstar.
As to what kind of person you are, Rexroth said, “The mature man lives quietly, does good privately, assumes personal responsibility for his actions, treats others with friendliness and courtesy, finds mischief boring and keeps out of it. Without this hidden conspiracy of good will, society would not endure an hour.”
And that is the hidden subtitle of this book: a conspiracy of friendliness. “Good poem” may seem faint praise compared to the blurbish terms brilliant, luminous, powerful, etc., but among friends, it’s all the compliment you’d ever need or want.
The pleasure of making this book is the chance to put poets such as Jennifer Michael Hecht and C. G. Hanzlicek and April Lindner and Ginger Andrews and Louis Jenkins into a club with Frost and Dickinson and Burns and Shakespeare.
The pain of it is to look at the book and realize who I left out who should’ve been here. I can think of a dozen without hesitation. I am sorry for the omissions.
But I hope that the includees know that their poems mean a lot to people. These are poems that made people stop chewing their toasted muffins and turn up the radio and listen and later zip into our website and get the dope on the poet. Many of these poems have been deeply loved by people, and why not? They deserve to be.
Raymond Carver wrote:
And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
 
—G.K.
Kathy Roach and Kay Gornick contributed mightily to making this book, and so did Brett Kelly and Molly Stern. And thanks to Hadassah Heins.