Now I will answer questions and here are the questions: Why do I write? Why do ordinary people dislike poetry? Are critics and college professors the legislators of good poetry? Is a poem body, spirit, or merely words? * I have fantasies of beautiful women reading my poems. I think of my them saving lives, opening eyes of people without a sense of humor, mysteriously satisfying those who do not need them, answering the sacred urges of musicians without lyrics. I cannot understand how I would stop; I would become what I should not be— a scourge of antidisestablishmentarianism, anti-intellectual scatological immorality, rusting heaps of metallic hell. What am I—a mite, a bead of sweat, the dropping of an extinct bird— unless I can breathe the scent of undiscovered meadows, eat cheeses made from the numinous milk of pebbles, drink water dripping from the imaginary roofs of caves. If you think I’m crazy now, I would seem even crazier, if I stopped writing. A misanthrope would appropriate my organs; my head would expand until no hat could span it; my hands would shrink until I couldn’t grasp a sesame seed. * If ordinary people dislike it, they don’t know what we’re talking about. They dislike something else entirely— a fear they dreamed during puberty, a discomfort they could flush down the toilet, the despicable spittle of a syphilitic, not the spittle of an opera singer, or the spittle of a wolf in the forest, or the spittle of South-American pine beetles that can cure a city of cockroaches. If ordinary people really come to dislike it, too late to prepare for the end! Greater misery couldn’t be inflicted. * A prophet could now be shouting at the edge of a busy street but no one would be paying attention. If the question has an answer, tell me who to ask for it, and I would use the answer to write a poem on how to fly using only your arms and breath. It would write a lever against apathy, a charm to banish pain, a machine to end all accident. It would be an infinite library, a universal temple, an ubiquitous coffee shop, an everlasting ritual of reassurance, more fun than sin, enough to save the world. But such an answer would end all other poetry. In a world with no misery no one must be comforted; where each person has everything, no one is seeking, no one needs a new way of looking. If I could start such a poem, I would never want to finish it. I would divide it into multitudes, dispense it to my friends and enemies, anoint every person with a syllable, at first a song in the morning, then a song for every hour then for every minute and every second, a word for every head that nods in wonder, a line for every disagreeing eye, a strophe for every tree, a space for every spring, creek, and river, a chapter for every mountain range and every valley, a book for every sea. * A poem is body, mine and yours— bodies that think, bodies that breathe, bodies that suck and drool. A poem is also spirit—the architecture of a gnat, the prayer of the cactus, leaves speaking in a wind. Also, a poem is words, squiggles with alveolars and fricatives, atoms of tone, molecules of chords, chronicles of clefs, rests, and stops piled like stones in a garden wall held together by a mortar of silence.
26-27 April 1998