It’s ten p.m. and I was just sitting on the side of the bed, in the dark, ready to crawl in and drift away and I started thinking about what it means to be a poet and that got me up off the mattress and to the keyboard. It’s been one of those month-long stretches of time when I have rarely been in the “poetry zone” and mostly on the go, taking care of business. It’s fine. There’s a big part of me that enjoys getting things done and flexing the left side of my brain as I get my new computer set up or train a new assistant in the chiropractic office or supervise workers installing new pipes in the shower and others trimming bushes in the backyard. 

I have grown a bit wiser over the last few years, at least enough to know that when there is such a spell of “doing” that seems to last forever, not to get too frustrated or upset or think that I’ll never write a line of decent (or any kind) of poetry again. It’s not how it has turned out in the past. I have always come back to write. What I know as true for me is that it is in the quiet, the silence, my creativity finds an opening to come forth. In the dark, or when I am alone, vulnerability shows up, a little fear. I walk nearer the edge of sociability and being a recluse. My senses awaken and deepen. I hear the spider move across the ceiling, feel the blood pulse in my veins and taste the chicken soup my mother fed me when I was seven, in bed with mumps.

Writing when there is noise, whether it is the television in the next room, cars and trucks on the street or my own head running down my to-do list a hundred times an hour, just doesn’t work. Sometimes I can do revisions on a poem or essay when there’s a lot going on around me and often lines or words or ideas I’d like to explore come floating along and I jot them down for future reference, but rarely, if ever, can I write anything worth its salt when I can’t lay down the stuff of the day and be prepared to weep at the unbelievable beauty and sadness of this human existence. I don’t expect to find much time in the next few days or possibly weeks to bask in quiet reverie, but I so cherish the opportunity to snatch an hour or two, like now, when the house sleeps and the only light is the glow of the computer monitor as the blank page slowly fills up with words.

As to my question about what it is to be a poet, I’m not sure if history is the best reference, if being a poet means you must withdraw from the world, to separate from it so that you can see it more clearly, or if it means that to write relevant and humanistic poetry you must participate with full vigor in all your life has to offer. My guess is that each poet has to define his or her own environment of involvement, how much to weave in and out of the inner and outer world and that they must do this based on what life has handed them and how they produce their best work. I’m still in the process of ferreting out the give and take of my own "poetry zone" and perhaps this, in the end, is what it is to be a poet—to be searching for a way to be of this world; to have a family, to love and hate, succeed and fail and through it all still be the one who speaks in tongues, the one who states emphatically that the emperor has no clothes, the one who dances on the slender edge of the night.

WANTS

Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:
However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flagstaff –
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.

Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes from death –
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.

Phillip Larkin
Collected Poems
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Publisher

JET

Sometimes I wish I were still out
on the back porch, drinking jet fuel
with the boys, getting louder and louder
as the empty cans drop out of our paws
like booster rockets falling back to Earth

and we soar up into the summer stars.
Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead,
bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish
and old space suits with skeletons inside.
On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness,

and it is good, a way of letting life
out of the box, uncapping the bottle
to let the effervescence gush
through the narrow, usually constricted neck.

And now the crickets plug in their appliances
in unison, and then the fireflies flash
dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation
for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex
someone is telling in the dark, though

no one really hears. We gaze into the night
as if remembering the bright unbroken planet
we once came from,
to which we will never
be permitted to return.
We are amazed how hurt we are.
We would give anything for what we have.

Tony Hoagland
Donkey Gospel
Graywolf Press, Publisher