Poets create . . . like diviners and soothsayers, who also say many fine things but do not understand their meaning.
—Plato
I don’t like a poet with small, soft hands
whose verse pretends more than he understands,
who’s written only the sort of poems
that never leave home without their combs—
a sandaled poet (wearing slacks, I suppose)
who carries an umbrella and can’t write prose.
I like a poet in boots, whose lines
are stones no one mistakes for shrines—
a large-handed man with a battered thumb
(the nail gone black, the rest gone numb),
who lays down words like bricks in a row
and never says what he doesn’t know.