It’s crucial for poets and other artists to participate not only in the discourse of their time but also in the specialized discourse of the art. How else can you make a contribution? Not only that, but how else can you learn your craft? Imagine if each of us had to reinvent the wheel each time before we made something. What we do instead, of course, is seek to learn the tools and then make them our own, so that we can make something that’s not been made before, something that makes a contribution so that we can in some way or another follow Pound’s dictum to “make it new.”

It’s not uncommon for a poet who is early in the craft to ask me to read their poems. And I’m glad to read – I think that’s a way of being responsible to the poets to come.  But I sometimes find myself approaching the poems with a bit of dread, because too often it seems to me that what I’m really being asked to do is to let the writer know if he or she happens to be a poetic genius who just hasn’t yet realized it. I want to let people know that my built-in genius detector doesn’t work very well . . . but I also try to let them know that my opinion is only that of one reader. I ask who are the poets they read, and I always try to suggest a few contemporary poets they might like. I try to respond tenderly, to honor the urge to use our common word trove to make things of beauty in a nearly impossible world, because the urge to make these things is itself a way to honor the earth and our common humanity, regardless of the achievement or “quality” of the poem. I always encourage the poets to keep reading and keep writing.

But knowing what has come before is crucial to help writers get past thinking or fearing that every word is precious. Good writing, mostly, is not written but rewritten, and it’s mighty hard to rewrite if at every move you’re afraid you might be painting over the Mona Lisa’s nose or taking chips out of the next Michaelangelo’s David. (By the way, the Mona Lisa and the David – they’ve been done.) It’s hard to surmount or throw away the limitations of the past if you don’t know what they are, hard to jump the fence if you don’t already know where the fences are.

Plus, reading is a great trigger to writing; one of the ways I recognize strong poems is if they make me want to respond, if they make me want to write. That’s one of the ways poems enrich my life, even if they aggravate me sometimes so I can hardly stand it.

Another responsibility to future artists, I think, is to do the best work we possibly can, to make their lives difficult, to make it as hard as possible for them to surpass us. William Stafford might argue with me on this, but setting the bar low is not, to my mind, making much of a contribution. I want to set it as high as possible, like Berryman and Strand, Auden and Roethke, Frost, Stevens, Yeats, Rilke, Hopkins – like so many poets have given to me.

 

 

Thank you. This is an interesting question, because one of the most telling things about any sociocultural milieu is what is unsayable. Learning what one can and cannot say is a crucial part of understanding the rules for social engagement, how to live in that social space.

In a real sense, the work of the poet is to eff the ineffable, to say and shout that which is unsayable. There is incredible power in doing that: as I write this, Hosni Mubarak has just resigned as president of Egypt, because the public first in Tunisia and then in Egypt dared to gather and shout what had heretofore been unsayable. The performance of poetry, both colloquial and classical, was only part of the way that Egyptians chose to make change. But what was once unsayable is now not only sayable – it has come to pass.

At the same time, restraint is a crucial component both in social life and in art. The world is cacophonous enough already, rude enough already, and so it’s usually a good idea to think first, speak second. We need only think of the people we know whose tendency is to blurt things out unfiltered, and the awkwardness and social inefficacy that this causes. And any form of art brings with it restraints, constraints, and demands it places on its practitioners.

One of the things I seek to do in a poem is to craft an experience for a reader or audience member. As a maker in the process of poiesis, I don’t get to dictate, but I do get to suggest, to influence – and I always want to leave space for, to ask (and demand) that readers and auditors bring something of themselves to the transaction. That seems to be an important form of restraint: I want to leave room for each reader and listener to complete the sentence, to bring their own thoughts and feelings and memories – their own colors – to the mix. If I say to you “1 + 1 = 2,” your response is rightly ho-hum, yes, sure, so what. But if in a poem I say “two plus two equals . . . ”, you can bring your own four, and if I do it well enough, you bring that four willingly, happily, and then we are making something together. Then we’re cooking.

After a performance of “Scars: A Love Story” a couple months ago, a director told me she liked how I didn’t try to sell the humor, how I just let it be there and those who got it got it, and those who didn’t, well, they didn’t. I think that’s another form of restraint, a letting something happen rather than making something happen.

 

 

This seems like an obvious answer, but someone has to say it: everything. But we can’t notice everything at the same time. One of the gifts poets offer us is the gift of attention – not only to the specific moments of the world around us, but also to the never-ending challenge of making sense of our mysterious selves in a mysterious world.

 

 

A really pivotal person in disability culture and disability studies died last year, and one thing I’m working on is an elegy for him and, with luck, the many heroes of an often-overlooked movement. I’m also working on a sequence of poems around my youngest brother, Dave, and how he profoundly changed our family when he was born. We’ll see where they both go.

 

I think poems and other forms of verbal art have the potential to have impact in people’s lives. Whether that’s toward finding or creating some degree of wholeness or in another direction probably depends on many things, including the poem and the listener or reader. I think poems can be occasions of for living a little fuller life – I know my life has been made richer again and again by poems.

 

 

 

Vincent Miles, 1918

 

 

Buddy Holly, Duane Allman, Charlie Christian, John Keats,

Otis Redding, Joplin, Hendrix, Robert Johnson, Bix, Hank,

Shelley, Plath, Randolph Bourne, Stan Rogers, Sam Cooke,

Jesus, Bird, Ochs, Machado, Mozart, Marilyn, Byron,

Steve Goodman, Rimbaud, Garcia Lorca, Gershwin, Pascal,

Dylan Thomas, Fats Waller, George Herbert, MLK,

 

 

Coltrane, Lennon, London, Poe,

Bobby, Lu Chi, Elvis, Django,

Bessie Smith, Wes Montgomery,

Chekhov, Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday,

Agee, Lawrence, Thoreau, Vallejo,

Nat King Cole, Baudelaire, Sexton, JFK,

Oscar Wilde, me, Orwell, Frida Kahlo,

 

 

Lester Young, Carver, Balzac, Rilke, Shakespeare,

James Wright, Vachel Lindsay, Descartes, Plutarch,

Hopkins, Roethke, Dickinson, Pope,

Dante, Special Ed, Beethoven, Foucault,

Chaucer, Berryman, Brecht, Joyce, Donne,

Irv Zola, Li Po, Hegel, Coleridge, Wittgenstein,

Hemingway, Aristotle, Cicero, FDR,

Rembrandt, Langston Hughes, Faulkner, Miles,

Milton, Rumi, Auden, Steinbeck, Leonardo,

Bishop, Merrill, Magritte, Neruda, Blake, Satchmo,

 

 

Ginsberg, Justin Dart, Whitman, Yeats, Jo Miles, Mississippi John,

Mark Twain, Samuel Johnson, Ellington, Eliot, Ibsen,

Gandhi, Emerson, Williams, Plato, Kant,

Wordsworth, Duchamp, Gwendolyn Brooks,

Samuel Beckett, Marianne Moore, Voltaire, Borges,

Pound, Frost, Henry Moore, Michelangelo, Picasso.

 

 

 

 

 

Quit whining. No one wants to hear

your whining. Everyone has pain,

the timing’s off for all year

round. (I’m in over my head again.)

Does no one feel well anymore?

Sure, stolen moments of joy stain

a bogus record of drudgery, boredom, and chores.

No clothing can cover this refrain.

 

Does whining make your spirits climb the ladder?

No chiming clock could sound off better.

You dump your petty pain all around you;

You puncture joy – like life only found you

and made it hurt. You’re not alone here –

our faded smiles show pain is always near.

 

 

¹ The Professional Standards and Image Protection Division of the American Medical Association™ objects to characterizing physicians as uncaring and less-than-godlike. The AMA™ affirms that physicians are both caring and godlike.²

² Without a vote of the full House of Delegates, the American Medical Association™ neither endorses nor condemns any individual poem. A motion to condemn this sonnet failed by a slim margin in the House of Delegates. Therefore, the AMA™ studiously ignores this poem.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have never ever seen anyone smoke

a cigarette the way you would clap

your cigaretted hand over your mouth,

cover it completely, and inhale like the last

puff of oxygen in the universe

was inside that burning little white stick

and you had to drag it out with your lungs

 

to save the world.

I never saw anybody smoke while eating.

Did you smoke in the shower?  I wondered

if you breathed smoke while you slept, like a dragon

or a fireman. I know you pulled those fire alarms

late at night in Schroeder Hall. I thought you were nuts.

I thought you were a pain in the ass. You were.

I thought it was funny that your parents moved

and didn't tell you: you came home at Christmas

and home wasn't there anymore. If it ever was.

I don't tell the story for laughs anymore.

Cigarettes are healthier than that family:

familiar and consistent and soothing

in their choking way. We all need nurture.

We all need something to breathe, something to take

inside us, to inspire us – to become us.

 

Maybe the smoke is like the first breath at birth,

sharp and cutting, a pain like love that keeps you

coming back for more, the barb on a fishhook,

once you take that first breath you're caught,

nailed, you keep running back, even though it hurts,

even though you know it's killing you, because it reminds

you of life, that first stab to the lungs,

and since the end is contained in the beginning

why not sample it now, why not take the breath

that is beginning and ending, birth and slow death, Moses

in the weeds that rise to strangle him. Why not

take a few minutes to make your mark on the air

that makes its mark on you, step on it not

like you crush a butt to put it out but

like you step on the gas

to go faster, to burn hot and clean,

to finally get where you are going.

 

You gulped

sweet, sludgy drinks like you smoked, slamming

them down in disdain and hunger till you passed out

or puked.  Or pulled fire alarms, smearing that glorious

paw print on the shattered sleep of hundreds. Drive

us all, Armand, the cell block weeps

and cheers for you. Moths

drum

my windows, beating themselves

against screen and glass.  Do they want

the incandescent over my head? The fluorescent

over the sink?  The candle burning here on my table?

Do they crave the photons, or do they just want closer

to the being who controls light, who

by twisting a switch, by jerking a plug, who with a breath

can take it all away?

That can't be it.

Say

I let them in, say they buzz the lamp until I go to bed –

then what?  Maybe overnight they lay eggs in my sweaters;

maybe tomorrow they get outside somehow to the sunlight;

maybe this wild drumming again tomorrow night: more light,

more light, we just want the light, give us the bright

and true and clear and different.

The match

is a start.  The cigarette keeps the fire going,

though duller;  smoke is how we eat the light.

Oh, the envy of the moths, why they chew our clothes –

Armand beat himself

against the window

and we watched like we might watch the news

over a glass of beer – but the hunger for more

than pretzels, change the channel, smoke

is not enough, fly to the window: Open up, let us in,

 

 

 

 

 

Let us arise and go now, and go

to Guantanamo, let us dream of snow,

and build a nation there, once upon a time

when we could freely breathe the air, we’d no

need to make up plights to scare us so,

adventurers would always go abroad to find

what’s there — and bring back booty and new frights.

As if the world was not scary enough —

the enemies within, our own bodies

turn on us if we keep them long enough —

germs, diseases, there’s always more to know,

and fear, and try to duck — but then, by God,

we’re stuck — we must obliterate each bush

an enemy might hide behind — that’s odd,

though — enemies within hide behind us.

Surveillance is the key, I’m watching you,

you’re watching me — and what you think I think

perplexes us all three: you, me, and he

who gave Guantanamo — and though our hearts

may sink, in a world of invisible ink

and secret code it’s there that we must go —

think too much and you have moved too slow‑

ly — without, within, the doubt, the sin — know

thyself, the truth will set you free — and snow

will cover all, or is it sea? No mind,

the prophecy is clear — it’s a jungle out there,

our only choice is fear — if nothing can be sole

or whole that has not first been rent, do they

who threaten favor us, or do they simply lead

to government? The capital is golden in

this capillary light; oh gods and markets, please

protect us from this will-to-power night-time flower

of halo blight. My fear is cold. If snow

will cover all, what of spring, what of thaw — the past

is far away, I think too much, I do not read

enough — so let it snow, and let us go, and go fast

to our Guantanamo, and there begin

redeeming sin, and there at last to face our past.

 

 

 

 

 

Paint a picture of a world in which you

are not dying of cancer. In which

we are not all dying. In which you use

only light colors, a pastel world

in which there is no darkness, no shadow,

no caves, no smutty dirt. In which

no doctor can cut you off at the root,

no labyrinth can make you dizzy,

in which no needle, no knife, no electron

beam need ever penetrate goose-pimpled

flesh.  In which cold shadow does not hover

at the front of my backbone, does not sally

out to organs major and minor,

does not paint my pancreas with lead and ice.

In which honor is virgin, and the rock

that is my desire speaks sunlight to the rock

that is my dread. In which I know

how to use the dark. In which the rock

that is my dread speaks cryptic light to me.