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We are living in a story, the Great Story. All the time we are living through beginnings, middles, and ends, transitions and changes that stir our thoughts, our emotions, our imaginings. We ponder The Beginning itself. We cannot help it. We are beings of wonder. C. S. Lewis said that we are living in a great and mysterious Story, and the great mystery is that we don’t know where we are in the Story. And so, wonderers and questioners that we are, we ponder also The End. We are living in a millennial time, a transitional time, not only the beginning of a new century but the beginning of a new thousand-year cycle, when the imagination is ripe with ultimate questions. “Everybody is talented, original, and has something important to say,” wrote Brenda Ueland in her little masterpiece of a book, If You Want to Write. As living characters in a great Story, embodying light and sound, it could not be otherwise. We long to find the words that are ours. We long to connect with others through those words. The poet and seer Walt Whitman saw this day coming. In “Song of Myself,” he wrote:

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and the sun…there are millions of suns left,
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand…nor look through the eyes of the dead…nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.

We are living in the time now that Whitman foresaw. We are Whitman’s children. Drawn to poetry, the reading of poems will not alone satisfy us. We not only want to know what poets know, we want to know how poets know. We want the experience of coming to know things for ourselves; perhaps intuitively we grasp that poets come to their knowing in the act of writing poems. For years we have been gathering experiences. Our very cells are filled with the substance of poetry, are tingling with light and sound. Is it possible to remain silent any longer?

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