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The path of the poet is indeed a master’s path. When you work at writing poems, you are no longer merely a reader of poets but their apprentice, their student, their colleague and compatriot in the country of poetry and its myriad kingdoms. Journeys and adventures begin. Dangers (to what you thought you knew) appear. The great Spanish poet Federico García Lorca likened the exhilaration of writing a poem to “hunting tigers without a gun.” Open and vulnerable, the new, the unexpected, can sometimes devour us.

And finally, writing a poem is an act of surrender. One follows the poem wherever it leads. The great English poet William Blake wrote:

I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.

All this is to say that, for the person who works at writing poems, life is never again the same. Seeing is not the same. Hearing is not the same. Thinking is not the same. Remembering is not the same. And dreaming is not the same. Everything is bigger; everything is more palpable. Think of the painter Georgia O’Keefe, who, when she began to really see flowers, had to paint them huge to capture what she saw. Perhaps you remember the scene in the popular movie Jaws when Sheriff Brodie (played by actor Roy Scheider), alone at the back of the shark-hunter’s boat, suddenly sees the great white shark up close for the first time. Backing slowly into the cabin, he announces to his two comrades, “You’re going to need a bigger boat.” After writing a dozen poems, you are going to say, “I’m going to need a bigger life.” Or you may think, “My life is bigger than I ever knew.” And it is, both wondrous and dangerous, requiring your vigilant attention and your courage (more on that later), and ultimately rewarding you beyond your dreams.

Yes, things happen when you work sincerely at a poem, and the only thing better than writing a poem is to write countless poems over a lifetime.

If you haven’t already, perhaps it is time to begin.

Chapter 3

Artists in Light and Sound

Great is language… it is the mightiest of the sciences,
It is the fullness and color and form and diversity of the earth…and of men and women…and of all qualities and processes;
It is greater than wealth…it is greater than buildings or ships or religions or paintings or music.

—Walt Whitman, “Great Are the Myths”

It is amazing to me that people actually keep themselves from writing poems. It is in our very nature to write them. We are designed for it. The universe is designed for it.

When I was growing up, I first wanted to be an artist or an architect. I drew all the time. I filled up the Sunday church program with drawings using the little eraserless tithing pencils in the backs of the pews. In the first grade we had to do portraits of our fathers for a parents’ night. In mine, I had filled in the large head of my father below the nose-line with scores of dots. “What are those?” the teacher asked. “He needs a shave,” I answered. The pride I felt in being the only first grader to think of and apply this “realism” to my portrait cannot be described. You would think I had invented perspective in drawing and painting, so great my accomplishment seemed to me.

In the third grade, the teacher decided I was the only student able to draw faces that looked different from each other, that looked like “individuals,” so, when we made a chalkboard-sized mural of the first Thanksgiving, all the other third graders drew headless Pilgrim bodies, and I had the duty of filling in the faces. It was a duty undertaken with a mixture of pride and disappointment. I was proud of the variety of faces I drew in, but I was exempted from the fun of drawing any Pilgrim bodies, though I did get to draw and color a few turkeys and cabins. I’m sure the other third graders were just as unhappy not getting to draw any heads. I thought I would grow up to be an artist. My father thought so too. Most everyone in my life assumed this. Making pictures was an intense and indescribable pleasure to me.

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