Long, long ago, in a different time warp (while in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars) I wrote:
If an FBI agent came to Johns Hopkins in search of a wanted poet who could not be found at home, where would we advise the search party to investigate? Certainly not in a business office or at the Nation’s capital. We would more likely advise them to a withdrawn stall in a library, at a foreign film festival, or at an obscure bar shooting pool.
The modern poem can be accessible in a world of inaccessibility and disjunction. A poem is indeed a tropical linguistic jungle, swarming with wild phrases and tropical stanzas. But if the poet creates an impenetrable jungle, the reader will return his sickle to the sheath, and head for home.
I am suggesting that more poets like Yeats can establish themselves. As Yeats wrote poems like No Second Troy, The Cold Heaven and The Wild Swans at Coole, expressly intensely personal concerns, he also wrote September 1913, In Memory of Major Robert Gregory, Sailing to Byzantium and The Second Coming, poems of contemporary social, historical and political significance. Thus Yeats’ poetry is not merely confessional, it joins hands with persons not only interested in the literature, but with the state of the modern world.
In the here and now….
Where do I fit into this contemporary scheme of modern American poetry? Readers do want to know who is saying what, and why s/he is saying it. Where exactly is the mainstream and how can the artist remain true to his/her sensibilities without overly diluting creation? It is indeed a balancing act.
I had the pleasure to meet Robert Penn Warren (All the Kings Men), poet and fiction writer, when he came to Johns Hopkins. He spoke to the unmasking of corruption, the durability of love and the genuineness of the natural world.
For me poems are bombs waiting to be defused. But should the poem be a bomb of little consequence, blowing up at the ocean floor where it affects the unseen? Should a poem explode and take its writer with it?
My work today is infused not only with personal sensibilities, but by the people I meet and care about, in and out of court and my law office, this day and this decade, growth and decay, social and communal responsibility, spirituality and nature, which drive onward even when culture stalls and waits for a tow.