I Felt At Some Point That I

There's This Pet Phrase About Writing That Is Bandied Around Particularly In Workshops About "finding Your Own Voice As A Poet", Which I Suppose Means That You Come Out From Under The Direct Influence Of Other Poets And Have Perhaps Found A Way To Combine Those Influences So That It Appears To Be Your Own Voice.

Listeners Are Kind Of Ambushed... If A Poem Just Happens To Be Said When They're Listening To The Radio. The Listener Doesn't Have Time To Deploy What I Call Their 'poetry Deflector Shields' That Were Installed In High School - There's Little Time To Resist The Poem.

And The Reason I Am Writing This On The Back Of A Manila Envelope Now That They Have Left The Train Together Is To Tell You That When She Turned To Lift The Large, Delicate Cello Onto The Overhead Rack, I Saw Him Looking Up At Her And What She Was Doing The Way The Eyes Of Saints Are Painted When They Are Looking Up At God When He Is Doing Something Remarkable, Something That Identifies Him As God.

I Find It Strange That - At Least In My Take On It - The People Who Are The Most Alarmed About The Dire Times We Live In Are The Ones Who Seem To Be Humorless, In Their Taste For Poetry Anyway. Humor Is Just An Ingredient. It's Always Been In Poetry. It Kind Of Dropped Out Of Poetry I Think During The 19th And Up To The Mid-twentieth Century. But It's Found Its Way Back. And It's Simply An Ingredient.

I Love To Move Like A Mouse Inside This Puzzle For The Body, Balancing The Wish To Be Lost With The Need To Be Found.