Tink shouted, “Did you hear my bad news?” I turned
from bucking up firewood and killed the engine.
How different he looked, our tough old bantam
neighbor– a rascal, but stolid as stone.

Here stood a suddenly tinier version.
No one in town would believe he’d cry.
Things had to be bad. He told me why:
“Mike’s gone. Some business called… aneurism.”

I caught my breath. Mike? His grandson?
Fallen at forty. Tink and Polly
had practically raised him up from a schoolboy.
(There were troubles with the in-between generation).

Tink’s gone, but I see him back twenty years,
red oak sawdust pooled at his feet.
I still can’t believe he actually weeps.
Two-stroke exhaust smoke loiters on air,

no matter I’ve choked the saw dead quiet.
Mosquitoes strafe us. I somehow recall
Mike passing in front of our house last fall,
trailed by the 6-point buck he’s shot.

Two flecks of blood have dried on one cheek,
and in spite of November’s chill, he sweats
from dragging that whitetail out of our woods.
For years he’s been bigger than Grandpa Tink.

So is the deer. (Mike will give our family
good venison backstrap later that autumn.)
Who’d predict I’ll go over to Tink and hug him?
Not even I. It’s surprising he lets me.

How long does he soak my shoulder like this?
Long enough, it seems, for me to sense
something like splendor in this awkward clench
by which I’ll always feel shocked and blessed.

On becoming my state’s poet laureate, I made it my mission to visit as many of its community libraries as I could. I paid many, many such visits, and savored each and all. Certain colleagues at the “prestige” colleges where I taught for over forty years seem always to have surmised that intelligence faded the moment one stepped away from an ivied campus. I always knew that attitude represented the worst sort of provincialism. I am the more assured in that knowledge for the library trips I’ve made, the more persuaded that there are a lot of smart people out there, however extensive or otherwise their formal education. Perhaps certain of the scholars would do well to spend time among them.

I’ve especially enjoyed that my audience members tend to ask not the allegedly sophisticated questions, which I’ve heard more than enough of in four decades of professorship; their questions are more basic, and thus more important, in that they represent concerns that everyone feels on contemplating a poem for the first time: who’s talking? why? where? And so on. For my taste, too much current poetry can’t answer those questions on the page, and even as a lifelong lover of poetry, I turn away from such work’s obscurantism.

The most frequent questions I hear, however, involve form and meter. There are those who wonder if something can be called poetry if it does not have a regular meter, regular stanzaic shape, and often as not, a rhyme scheme.

Now I am a formalist myself, something not all that common in our day (though I think and even hope this is unobvious when I read, because I pause in my recitation when the grammar does, not when a line does). I even use a goodly amount of rhyme and half-rhyme. And yet I employ these tools merely because they enable me, not because they represent capital-P Poetry.

Indeed, I steadfastly refuse to grind any ax in the free verse/formal verse debate, partly since it seems to it make advocates on either side suddenly go brain-dead. Of course poetry can exist in an unrhymed and unmetered format: consider, to pick an ancient and glaring example, the biblical Psalms. Of course poetry can be formally constrained without being “academic”: never mind my own small example; consider Robert Frost, a die-hard formalist…who managed to capture the sound of actual speech far more effectively than an Ezra Pound ever did.

The passionate free-versers may believe that their mode is anti-establishment, a claim that could be made for it if this were 1920; since then, and surely now, free verse reigns supreme in virtually every academic MFA program and among the most celebrated poets of our time. In short, it is the establishment practice.

The other sect of blind debaters, however, alleges that free verse shows sloppy thinking, shoddy technique – as if that applied, say, to Robert Lowell or, more contemporarily, to Louise Gluck. In short, these aspersions are no more or less bright or accurate than those of the free-verse crusaders, who impute coldness, sexual frigidity, political reaction, and – again – “academicism” to formalist delivery — as if any of these charges were relevant to the giants of the twelve-bar Delta blues, a mode that is surely America’s greatest formal contribution to world culture, and whose format, in the words of my friend, the excellent Vermont poet Baron Wormser, constitutes the American sonnet.

As I hear the free vs. formal debate rehearsed, I am too depressingly reminded of political dialogue in our day. I am never shocked by the slogans on either side of the liberal/conservative divide. It’s as though there were no real need for any of us to look at a given issue from more angles than just one: we liberals already know what the conservatives are going to promote; but we fail to see how perfectly predictable our own orthodoxies are.

When I was appointed poet laureate, I claimed in my address that a little humility never hurt anyone. The humble but crucial questions I encounter at the state’s libraries assure me that there remain at least a few open minds in the nation.

The widower pushed the tailgate shut and fell.
The two sounds –click and thud– seemed synchrony,
As if one in fact were function of the other.
The red calf, bound for veal in the pickup’s bed,
Looked rearward over his shoulder. No one there.
A ginger-hackled rooster, framed by the door
Of the loft, screamed loudly, sun igniting him
To noontime flame. He sent six hens in a dash
For cover under bush and sill, as though
His love-assault might be a thing far worse
Than the farmer felt – or rather did not feel,

The death so quick and commotionless his livestock
Didn’t notice. Everything once had purpose
Here, and meaning, and might still have, if only
He’d stayed to read them. Now a skinny cloud
Rode unremarked on a breeze above the barn,
Unsafe and leaning. His horse, a spavined relic
From other ages, whickered behind the house,
All canted too, its paint mere scattered flakes.
Meaning and purpose had blurred in recent years
But the farmer kept right after them no matter.
Who’d free the weanling now, who lead him to slaughter?

So: how do poems get generated in my mind? Well, they certainly never begin with what, in my teaching days, students called “ideas.” They tend rather to begin with some sensory recall, more often than not auditory. This can be the sound, say, of a certain woodpecker on a very still spring morning; a snatch from an old Monk tune; or, as in this case, most typical for me, a small chunk of conversation that has lodged itself in mind, whether or not I know it.

After a reading last year, somehow an audience member mentioned a farmer of his acquaintance, one who like all small farmers in the era of agribusiness, had struggled to keep his place going, and one who’d just dropped dead while closing the gate of his pickup on a veal calf.

For whatever reason, I vividly heard the click of the tailgate and the thud of the man’s body when it fell.

And then my mind shot back more than fifty years to a farmer whom I had worked for in those old summers. He’d lost his wife and, age supervening, was finding the relentless labor of his calling more and more difficult. He said to me, a boy not yet eighteen, “This place used to have a meaning and a purpose.” The click and thud instantly married that remark, and I fused the two countrymen into one. I had only to fill in the physical details of the farmhouse and farmyard to finish the poem. Whatever its merit, then, “Abbatoir Time” was all but given to me. If that’s inspiration, so be it, inspiration in such a case really being a sort of selective and synthesizing memory.

Which leads me to a terse answer to another frequent question: are my poems always founded on my own factual experience? Well yes, of course, who else’s? Yet the facts per se may have transpired at different times, in different places. There is, for example, no actual single farmer who experienced the specific moments I render here; and yet I hope my imaginative construct, my blending of two figures, shows a “true” account of a human being in the situation I describe—I hope it is true in the sense of being more or less faithful to anyone’s sense of loss and diminishment.

–for Goran Simic

I dropped into sleep while reading a book of poems

by the Bosnian friend I write for here. They’re brilliant,

full of red flowers and graves and wrenching accounts

of his homeland during the 90s. They lend some perspective

on our COVID-19 scourge, which I don’t mean to downplay,

much less to discount the unforgivable part

in worsening it of our leader, jackass and villain.

Goran’s a Serb, and his wife was a Muslim woman:

during the troubles, he really had nowhere to turn.

His poetry makes my guts knot; it’s not a sort

you’d think of as soporific, but being so anxious

for three generations of family has made me restless

almost each night, and so of course I was tired.

I’d been sitting in my wife’s dear grandfather’s rocker,

handsome but sternly wooden. I still nodded off,

and when I came to, I noticed I had drooled

on my shirtfront, like any old fool might do; and yet

the sun of afternoon through the kitchen window

turned even the spot of spittle to something lovely.

Unlikely enough, and the next things to snare my attention

were a once-vivid mum in a glass and a reddish balloon

left from my wondrous partner’s 64^th birthday,

back before we knew what the world was in for–

though that contemptible leader had been forewarned.

Our grandchildren’s eyes turned bright as my wife blew out candles,

the smaller kids batting balloons like that one up

into air… All that before some weeks unraveled

and people got sick, many died, and that balloon

and that flower, sole survivors, puckered and shrank

to half their old sizes and somehow looked so sad

that I went back– it makes no sense, I know–

to those agonizing poems of plunder and murder.

The following essay is from my forthcoming collection, The Music of What Happens, a compendium of newspaper articles I wrote as Vermont Poet Laureat (2011-2015):

People have often asked me, of course, why I chose poetry as my principal vocation. I like to joke that it’s all about money, women, and fame . . . which is, of course, just that: a joke. The best-selling poets in America would do well to attract more readers than a last-place major league baseball team might draw in late September of a hopeless season.

So there have to be other motives. I could go on at length about these, but I’ll try to distill my thoughts here.

I came to poetry late, not publishing my first collection until I was forty. Prior to that, I had striven to be a conventional academic, though from the start somehow, the whole effort felt a little misguided. I didn’t know why for some time.

In 1970, I was asked to teach a section of Dartmouth College’s first-ever creative writing course, not because of my credentials—I had none—but because the then chair of my department, a good man indeed, imagined the gig would give me time to finish up my Ph.D. dissertation, as I had not yet done. This would not after all be a “real course,” he assured me; it would demand neither class preparation nor any scrupulous commentary on the students’ work.

And yet in teaching that course (I use the verb loosely), I felt the return of an old itch to write, one I’d experienced in my undergraduate days, when I composed quite a number of short stories. None of these was created for a course, because in the early sixties there were no writing courses as we know them where I went to school either. In the interest of economy, I won’t go into my reasons for responding to that impulse by choosing poetry over fiction. Suffice it to say that I did so choose, and though I have written a novel and five collections of personal essays since, poetry has remained my chief métier.

A different and less kindly disposed department chair eventually came to me and indicated that, although my reputation as a teacher was pretty good, Dartmouth had now become a publish-or-perish institution. When I noted that my first poetry collection was under contract, this fellow, not quite concealing his smirk, suggested that, just as creative writing was not a “real” course, a book of poems did not constitute “real” publication.

I’d finished my dissertation by then. In it, I’d sought to ape the suddenly voguish posture of the theorist. For such a reason, it remained an obscure screed, even to its author, whose inclinations were and are, non-, even anti-theoretical. I decided nonetheless to mine the paper for a few scholarly articles (at that time, one didn’t have to offer whole books to meet the publishing requisite), but on reconsidering my own prose, I felt something very like nausea. I recall saying right out loud, “This is not what I want to do when I grow up.” I resolved to go on writing verse and to let the chips fall where they might.

I was denied tenure at Dartmouth, but was quickly hired at Middlebury, which had something of a history of writer-professors. This was a better fit. But all that aside, the real question is, why should scholarship have seemed a pursuit so ill-suited to me? I’ve thought the matter over many times. It was not because I felt contempt for scholarly enterprise; indeed, I still value the training I got in world literature, both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student. And I have published a book of essays that—although I hope it’s devoid of jargon and hyper-annotativeness—might legitimately be called a work of scholarship.

No, my choice of poetry had to do with the fact that it more nearly answered to my own mental tendencies. Whereas scholarship, even in its often impenetrable post-modernist avatars, still ultimately depends upon premise and conclusion, upon the dialectical approach, the realm of lyric poetry—at least for me—is roughly described by Carl Jung when he speaks of true psychology as the domain “always … of either-and-or.” That is, lyric can keep multiple perspectives alive within one frame without seeming merely to be a muddle. Perhaps this is what Keats meant when he famously spoke of Negative Capability, the capacity to live with “Mysteries, Uncertainties and Doubts, without any irritable reaching after Fact and Reason.”

Negative Capability, so understood, enables me to indulge what another great poet—T.S. Eliot—called the “necessary laziness” of the poet. To use a reductive buzz phrase, it is a right-brain enterprise. To relax the muscular, either/or approach to experience is to open oneself to unanticipated possibilities, and to let them come as they will.

And to let them come in all their fullness. It may be cliché to say that lyric captures the intensity of certain moments, but so it does for me. This is true, I think, even if the moment that catches my attention never eventuates in a written poem. I know I sound a bit fogeyish to say so (I am in my seventies, and have a right), but the fact that most of anyone’s moments are ephemeral and diffuse seems the more evident in the age of Twitter and (the very word speaks volumes) of the selfie. For me, the lyric impulse allows me to see certain “deeper” moments, to concentrate them in what I hope, however vainly or justly, may be memorable language. Among the very deepest of those moments in my own experience, for eloquent example, are the witnessing of the births of five children. The plethora of responses to such events could never be catalogued nor exhausted, but one can go farther toward rendering their impact—or so I believe—via the language of poetry than by any other mode of discourse.

Lightning scarcely strikes every day. If it did, I’d write 365 poems a year. But that it might strike at any moment makes me feel alive and attentive, makes me open to all manner of novelty, if I can adequately ignore mundane distractions (and of course I can’t; who does?). It feels that such newness is always available out there, no matter I have been recording my responses for more than four decades now. Until I take the long sleep, I’ll believe that something fresh may be right around the bend.