Poets may inhabit a realm of words, but they remain closet numerologists. Perhaps it’s a vestigial memory of counting syllables in all those lines of iambic pentameter, but ten seems like a significant number, and so ten books feels like a milepost worth pausing beside, a place to assess, examine, parse, and reassemble. Thus this book, which surveys thirty-five years of writing (the most recent poems were written in 2016, the oldest in 1981), though only eight of my ten previous collections are actually represented here. Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition is a book-length poem that feels complete unto itself, while XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century is too recently published to need revisiting. Longer poems are simply harder to accommodate, and so “The Bob Hope Poem” is represented by only a single section, while works such as “The Florida Poem” and “Dawn Notebook” are absent altogether.
The mandate of such a collection, as I see it, is to offer a hint of where you are going while charting the territory already explored. Accordingly, the first of this book’s five sections is composed of new poems, written over the past six or seven years, in a variety of shapes and sizes. In the hopes of creating a book that harmonizes with, but does not echo, the originals, I have organized older poems by form rather than chronology: there are two sections of lyric poems, a lengthy set of prose poems, and a sequence of longer poems reconstituted as an episodic personal epic, “An Odyssey of Appetite,” which explores America’s limitless material and spiritual hungers. If anything has obsessed my creative impulse to date, surely it is this. There is also a scattering of uncollected poems, happy to have found a home at last. Nouns & Verbs is just that, I hope—not a greatest-hits collection but a new house sheltering some familiar residents, a book that stands on its own solid foundation, unbothered by a few termites in its beams or a little rain seeping in around the windows.