Introduction

The girl with a far too-obvious perm is leaning in the warm light under a ceiling fan, against a shelf lined with bags of coffee. The paint on the windowsill is flakey, the conversations bud up to a strange volume then die away, uncovering the click of dishes being washed in the back kitchen of the coffee house. Someone is arguing with the cashier. Someone is confessing. A batch of green vines are bobbing in the wind along wrought-iron railings just outside, in the last of summer in Chattanooga. Here, like an invocation, a poem or a song comes back to me, addressing my needs. I open a book or call something to mind, during a few minutes when my wife is checking her email, and I find myself spoken to. An outside party has ventured in. A warm hand has rested on my shoulder or slapped my back. I’m full as if after a good meal. Art dignifies and enriches life. Mostly, this happens via language.

I’ll make my opinion on this clear from the start: words work in service of something. They do not possess the kind of power they do over us because they only reveal and re-articulate ourselves. To Czeslaw Milosz, all words were a silence leading up to the one grand Word that comes to us after death, answering all the questions of mortality. That Word, the saving Word, is spoken by a person, and one whose speaking is a greater mystery and wonder then all the good poetry poets have ever conjured up.

But all the same words are a gift exchanged by people to people. Anyone who has ever read aloud the last lines of Frost’s Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening knows the undeniable satisfaction of his conclusion:

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

and miles to go before I sleep.”

    There is no telling what long journeys, physical or otherwise, that poem has helped its readers cope with. Frost’s almost audible sigh, his acceptance of the bleakness of the moment, is better than a platitude, or even piece of clear advice. It puts a name on something we have felt, and that action by itself pleases us. I once listened to an audio show titled “Can Poetry Matter?,” a question that brought real laughter to my lips because to those of us who read and enjoy poetry, that is the same as asking if life can matter. What good art brings to us is the experience of being. We can instantly recognize bad art because it doesn’t taste of living in the world. It’s functions and aspirations are as many and as various as ours, but what it returns to us is what we have already put in to life: exhaustion, tears, sex, prayers, anger and long walks, giddiness and boredom, work, lies, my evening in a coffee shop, etc. etc.
    This place is a wall upon which I will scratch remembrances of that which enriches. To lay a few parameters, I hope that it will always be related to my personal experiences as well as to that which enhances those experiences. Another way to say this would be to say that here I will list the things that remind me of the speaker of that saving Word. You might say that I hope all the words here will rhyme with that one. Part of the way I will seek to understand my own ideas will be to investigate the ideas of others. There's no reason not to start now. As a note, I'm not ashamed of my bias for poetry, but will try to swerve away from time to time for the sake of freshness. 

    Robert Hass, former U.S. Poet Laureate, and long-time host of Berkeley’s Lunch Poems, for which well-known contemporary poets gather in a room at Berkeley college lined with books, and spend an hour or so doing readings (you can see his own contribution to the series at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJCbwBnHFbg), thinks of poetry as the praise of the indescribable in life. Bruce Bond wrote an excellent essay on his work entitled “The Abundance of Lack,” where he describes Hass as extremely perceptive of the failure of language to fit in all of life. To Hass, language is not the running beast, but its footprint, and it delights us because it perpetuates desire to see the beast itself.

    One of my favorites of his, from his most recent collection, Time and Materials, is called “That Music.” Like all of his best work, it is georgeous in its simplicity. When spoken aloud, each of his words lends a beauty to the next which makes any of them seem scrumptious enough to be enjoyed all on its own. Playing on the tension that Bond describes between what words do and what we know they cannot, this little poem ends on an unresolved note of wonder fueled by longing. It would be Hass’s argument that the one can’t exist without the other.

That Music

The creek's silver in the sun of almost August,
And bright dry air, and last runnels of snowmelt,
Percolating through the roots of mountain grasses
Vinegar weed, golden smoke, or meadow rust,

Do they confer, do the lover's bodies
In the summer dusk, his breath, her sleeping face,
Confer--, does the slow breeze in the pines?
If you were the interpreter, if that were your task.