Dark Matter & Sticky Stuff: Thoughts, Poems, Confessions

Iowa has designated this year “The Year of the Arts and Humanities.” You may be amused to know that National Public Radio, on the first day of the month, announced that September is also “Be Kind to Writers and Editors Month.” I hope to take full advantage of that.

The phrase “Arts and Humanities” brings to mind W. H. Auden’s poem about the exotic words for different kinds of lakes. About them he writes, “Just reeling off the names makes one ever so comfy.” I think the phrase “Arts and Humanities” makes us feel comfy, more creative, more studious, more thoughtful, even more human, but we can’t pretend that the Arts and Humanities are still housed protectively, if ever they were, within the ivory tower of the Academy. That hasn’t been true for decades. Nor did it matter. For these areas of investigation and creativity, whether engaged in the political arena or not, are always of the moment.

I’ll try to say why, saying something about the poetic process as I go and strengthening or weakening my case with some examples from my four decades of writing. Although world events have often infiltrated my writing, and my thinking about writing, I am not going to emphasize, not today, the political character of the arts and humanities. Those are inescapable and vital aspects of the arts. I have myself written many political poems and been part of political protests. But everything has been said many times over about these matters, and I would hope that we all agree that artistic expression is part of intelligent dissent, that there is a reason why minorities and outsiders constitute a disproportionate share of a nation’s artists, that there is no nation on earth whose governments are not accountable for atrocities that deserve the vocal opposition of writers, and that most artists are citizens, too, who care about more than their art. Who could disagree? Consequently, that is not my subject today, at least not directly.

Also, it’s important to note, in case there’s anyone in the room who hasn’t noticed, that I’m a geezer, which means I come to you from the past. I bring you greetings from a time before cable and satellite television, before twenty-four hour news and reams of junk mail, before the Internet and SPAM, a time when there were far fewer people on the planet, an age before cell phone chatter, dinner-time telemarketers and greedy SUVs, a time before gigantic franchises, a time when the arms industry was smaller and the body count less--a time, that is, when the worst of the human condition was not, like they say, “in our face” all day every day. America, whatever its dreadful flaws at the time, had the illusion that it had fought Malthusian principles to a standstill.

Back then, literary poetry, by which I mean poetry that had ambitions for language, was largely a manifestation of individualism. There was great excitement in pushing the envelope of human imagination. An individual voice became the sine qua non of a good poet. Individualism was, after all, the backbone of the United States. Moreover, we believed technology would perfect society. Technology—the Industrial Revolution, the Computer Age, the Space Age—would heal, feed, house and clothe the world and eliminate warfare. In American poetry, too, technique was paramount, a visible sign of progress. When E. E. Cummings began a poem, “Progress is a comfortable disease,” it read like humorous detachment, not a prediction.

We know better now. Technology, useful as it can be, is only as beneficent as the soul of the nation that employs it. We also know that, in a world forever to be beset by calamity, we need survival skills of all kinds. Not just skills for physical survival, but skills for our psychological and emotional health. In particular, young people need survival skills that strengthen their inner resources against the brutality of politics, crime, sickness and war, and help them find philosophical footing to go with a pained conscience. Experience isn’t enough. One needs special ways of thinking, knowing and being.

The arts push the envelope of human expression and define a culture, while the humanities study the past to imagine our prospects. They look deeper, they look behind and ahead, they enter dreams and visions. They are, the Arts and Humanities, the means by which we imagine and explore the future. Nothing less.

Whatever the circumstances among nations, we also live in a world of endless mystery, a world largely invisible to us and which only the imagination can approach. Hence, much of our art is born from uncertainty, mystery, the nearly inexpressible, the wordlessness of emotions and the complexity of existence. Art is, like pure science, an investigation into the unknown. And thus, the title of my talk: “Dark Matter & Sticky Stuff.”

If the terms “Dark Matter” and “Sticky Stuff” sound as if they refer to things I can’t see and things I can’t shake, you have it right. I borrowed these phrases--”Dark Matter” and “Sticky Stuff”--from astronomy and quantum physics. I like them because they sound down-to-earth, if not downright homey, yet they refer to matters of universal importance.

I like ideas to have a little dirt on their shoes. Therefore, I was not just delighted but downright giddy when the astronomers came up with the term “Dark Matter” to refer to what they can’t see that lies between what they can see. In other words, Dark Matter is the stuff between the stuff. Meanwhile, the quantum physicists decided to refer to what holds together the smallest recordable elements of the atom as . . . what else?, ”Sticky Stuff.” What terrific terms for that which we can’t see and that which we can’t escape. I may not be able to follow Einstein’s theory of relativity, but I feel I understand in my bones the concepts of “Dark Matter” and “Sticky Stuff.” I have not traveled in outer space, I do not leave my body, I have never--not even once--been abducted by aliens, I am not in touch with spirits from the past, I am neither a psychic nor a seer, but I have been living with Dark Matter and Sticky Stuff my whole life.

Think about it. Writing is about . . . Dark Matter and Sticky Stuff. Philosophy and religion are about Dark Matter and Sticky Stuff. Morality and ethics are certainly about Dark Matter and Sticky Stuff. Much of the time, simply trying to say what is on one’s mind means dealing with Dark Matter and Sticky Stuff. The ups-and-downs and ins-and-outs of life are inextricably bound up with Dark Matter and Sticky Stuff.

I need to make a small qualification here, in deference to my wife, Dorothy. She has cautioned me not to apply the concepts of Dark Matter and Sticky Stuff too widely. She points out, for example, that I should probably not apply them to gourmet cooking, although, being a known chocoholic, she says she will permit me to apply the terms to desserts. “Waiter, I’ll have the Dark Matter, and she’ll have that Sticky Stuff.”

Incidentally, astronomers learned recently that there is even more Dark Matter in the heavens than they thought. Robotic telescopes have now mapped the region of the universe inhabited by Earth, and the astronomers have found that cosmic structures have a maximum size. They weren’t sure about this before, but now they know that these structures can be only so big. And once again, they have come up with a remarkable term. This limit, this maximum size, they call--get this--“The End of Greatness.”

Don’t we gather in classrooms, in the dorm or the diner, sometimes in church, in part to try to raise some of that Dark Matter into our consciousness and to try to better understand the Sticky Stuff of our lives? It isn’t easy. One can’t turn on a lamp to study the dark. Nor can one walk on flypaper. Even earnest, conscientious analysis leaves us exasperated. The philosopher John Stuart Mill reminds us that, “A habit of analysis tends to wear away the feelings.” But still we find ways. For some of us, writing became the way to get at what we can’t see and can’t escape. For the essence of the creative method is that one does not need to know ahead of time--indeed, should not know--what it is one is going to make. Kierkegaard said that laughter is a kind of prayer, and I would add that play is a kind of study.

Poets do not so much say in their poems what they know as what they didn’t know they knew. When you think about it, that’s not so strange. We all do this in conversation, confidently dogpaddling forward without quite knowing where we will end up. To anyone who insists that we “get to the point,” or “cut to the chase,” we might respond, as a frustrated writing student said to the novelist E. M. Forster, “How do I know what I mean till I see what I say?”

There is a fair amount of improvisation in the arts, a good deal of flying by the seat of one’s pants and going on one’s nerve, lots of accident and a whole lot of dumb luck. Artists accumulate techniques, but they also trust their instincts. It’s hard to get writers, in particular, to fess up about how they make art because they fear that, if they tell you the truth, you won’t respect them in the morning.

The story goes that one of George Balanchine's dancers asked him what the ballet they were rehearsing was about. In order to dance it, she said, she needed to know the story. But Balanchine wasn't one of those choreographers who thought ballets needed to tell a story, and he said, "It's not about anything; it’s just steps." But the dancer said again that she simply had to know what the ballet was about, and Balanchine said, "Okay, then, it's about time." And the dancer said, "What do you mean it's about time?" And Balanchine said, "It's about fifteen minutes long."

Before I go any further, this being a thoughtful audience, I have a little quiz for you. I found it in a newspaper where it was used as filler.

It's a multiple choice question bearing on the arts. The question is: Which president, during a dark period in his term, said, "What this country needs is a good poem?" You have four choices: Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, or Jimmy Carter.

As to what it takes to write poetry, there is a quatrain by the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, just four lines of poetry, which say this:

People possess four things
that are no good at sea:
anchor, rudder, oars
and the fear of going down.

Well, I grew up on the Atlantic Ocean, and, like many of you, I know the importance of an anchor, a rudder, a set of oars, and even a healthy fear of drowning to remind one to play it safe. But no, says Machado, "People possess four things / that are no good at sea: / anchor, rudder, oars / and the fear of going down." What’s the point? The point is, why go to the same islands all the time? Why have the same thoughts all the time? Why not abandon oneself to the medium (in the case of Machado's poem, the medium is the sea; in the case of writing, the medium is language)--why not abandon oneself to the medium, to the materials, and end up somewhere new? Why not try what poet William Stafford liked to call “adventuring in the language?” Maybe poetry written in such a way will find, once in a while, new expressions of the human condition. For poetry, like music, is finally about what life feels like. Even the poet Ezra Pound, one of the most erudite of twentieth century poets, knew it. It was Pound who said, “Nothing counts in a poem save the quality of the emotion.”

“Quality” is a big word in that sentence. When it comes to emotion, sometimes words fail us, and at other times none are needed. But what if we feel sometimes that we need to find the words, words to express something more than the material moment? What if feeling is crucial to it? Raw emotion by itself won’t do. When we hear a person screaming, we usually can’t tell what he or she is saying.

Nor does yelling say much more than “ouch!” Imagine, for a moment, that I latch onto one of you just outside the door after this, and I grab you by your lapels and I pull you real close to me--I “get in your face,” like they say--and I say to you, “Listen, I have to tell you something, something important about all of us. Whatever good and beautiful feelings and thoughts we contain--love, hope, faith, charity, compassion--we also sometimes contain some not so good and not so beautiful thoughts and feelings. Greed, jealousy, selfishness.... Even sometimes hate. And those feelings, too, can overtake us completely.” And then I could attempt to really convince you by pulling you even closer and staring into your eyes like Robert Mitchum playing the part of the itinerant preacher in the movie “The Night of the Hunter,” in which he has L-O-V-E written on the knuckles of one hand and H-A-T-E on the knuckles of the other--I could pull you real close to me and shout, “Hate! Hate! Hate! Hate!”

Talk about Sticky Stuff! You’d want to get away. You wouldn’t be convinced of anything except that I was manic and maybe crazy. But suppose I said it this way:

My Hate

My hate is like ripe fruit
from an orchard, which is mine.

I sink my teeth into it.
I nurse on its odd shapes.

I have grafted every new variety,
walked in my bare feet,

rotting and detached,
on the fallen ones.

Vicious circle. Unfriendly act.
I am eating the whole world.

In the caves of my ill will
I must be stopped.

That, I think, has a different effect because it expresses the feeling. Aristotle said that the surest sign of poetic talent was the ability to use metaphor. I don’t know about that, but I do know that it’s only my loyalty to a metaphor (you can call it a simile if you like) that found the content of this poem. Shortly after publishing the poem in 1962, I visited a high school in Chicago where a student in the front row told me she had seen it and was afraid of me, and I had to reassure her that I wasn’t the speaker in the poem.

Herbert Hoover. It was Herbert Hoover, an Iowan, who said this country needs a good poem.

So much for trying to pin down hate. How about the Dark Matter and Sticky Stuff we call love? In the movie “The Girl on the Bridge,” a young woman says that “Life begins when you make love.” Of course she had it right, except for the word “make.” Well, although in this area also I don’t want you to mischaracterize me as the young woman in Chicago did on the basis of my poem “My Hate,” I have to tell you that one summer in Port Townsend, Washington, my wife and I made love on the sidewalk. A young woman had arranged coins on the sidewalk to nearly spell out, in big letters, “L-O-V-E” (she still had some spaces in the letters), so when she asked us if we wanted to “make love on the sidewalk,” she got our attention.

The young panhandler had turned an abstraction into something tangible. I was going to say “into something concrete,” but of course a sidewalk is always concrete. The trouble with abstractions like “love” and “hate” is that by themselves they have no specific meanings. No one knows what “I love you” means. We each have to fill in the meaning from our experience. Poetry and its cousin, song, are often used simply to try to say, “I love you.”

I’ve tried it too. Now, I tend to write poetry very late at night and only when the pot boils over, though of course over the years I have learned how to turn up the heat. But one day, without waiting for the temperature to rise, I set out to write a love poem for my wife, Dorothy. If I could write it in time, I could have it secretly printed and secretly framed and wrap it in a big box for Christmas.

Well, everyone knows the difficulty in trying to write a love poem. The difficulty is that everyone knows what a love poem says. The world is chockablock with love poems. Every gift shop has hundreds of them folded into greeting cards. Hence, love poems are in danger of being viewed as pro forma, insincere. I needed a line with which to begin that would not seem to be the usual thing. I called my poem “To Dorothy,” and this is how I began it: "You are not beautiful, exactly." Well, if you write that line to your wife, you had damn well better write another line. This is my poem to Dorothy, written thirty years ago:

To Dorothy

You are not beautiful, exactly.
You are beautiful, inexactly.
You let a weed grow by the mulberry
and a mulberry grow by the house.
So close, in the personal quiet
of a windy night, it brushes the wall
and sweeps away the day till we sleep.

A child said it, and it seemed true:
"Things that are lost are all equal."
But it isn't true. If I lost you,
the air wouldn't move, nor the tree grow.
Someone would pull the weed, my flower.
The quiet wouldn't be yours. If I lost you,
I'd have to ask the grass to let me sleep.

The quantum physicists tell us that the presence of an observer changes the results of the experiment. It is the same with words. In language there is always slippage from inaccuracy, from idiomatic distortion, from personal and cultural bias, and from scientific and social change. No word ever means exactly what another does. Look up a synonym for any word, and the second word is never precisely the same. On top of that is the problem that there are, as we sometimes put it, “no words” for much of what we feel and think. The mind can think more than one thing at a time. It can move too fast to be recorded. My language and yours are not identical. Even when we use the same words, we mean them differently. Promote the word into a phrase, and the phrase into a sentence, and the sentence into a paragraph--well, you see the problem. But our language overlaps. If you say, “I’m about to punch you,” I’ll probably duck. As Henry David Thoreau put it, “Some evidence is incontrovertible, as for example when you find a trout in the milk.”

There are theorists of language who work in the areas where language does not overlap, pointing this out. But most writers work in the overlaps. If poets sometimes write in ways that are odd, unsettling or obscure, it is because they are trying to express something for which there is, in a sense, “no words,” to get beyond language, to express the feeling with the words. The oddness, the eccentricity, the recklessness at times of poetry is not meant to conceal, but to reveal.

As many of you no doubt know, Zen says that the causes of our suffering are inside us. During the nineteen-nineties, my advancing age and my interest in ideas with a little dirt on their shoes led me to embrace an old Zen admonition: Live as if you were already dead. What does it mean? One thing it suggests is that one should both participate fully and take the long view.

I ended up writing two books of what came to be known as “Dead Man poems.” But first I wrote just one, and without intending to. One winter in Port Townsend, Washington, a small town located on the Quimper Peninsula, which is a bump northward off the larger Olympic Peninsula, I wrote a poem that seemed, afterwards, to be a part of something else, something bigger with a longer view, as if it were a new chapter of an old text: perhaps one lost to antiquity, or one never written down.

I confess I prefer to write poetry that has philosophical import, and seeks new language for the purpose of philosophical exploration. I confess also that there were technical considerations stemming from years of thinking about what is misleadingly called “free verse.” But intention and theory are smoke screens when it comes to explaining poetry. The fact is, I was going on fifty years of age, the usual life expectancy for men in my family, I was living in the Northwest where the winter sun goes down at 4 p.m., and I was putting together a Selected Poems, which, to someone like me who cares only about the next poem, is a form of death.

I called my poem, if that’s what it was, “from: The Book of the Dead Man,” though there was no such book, and I had no intention of writing it. In fact, I did not write another Dead Man poem until four years later. Dead Man poems can be serious or not, sometimes both at the same time. They think everything at once. Some are political. Moreover, the Dead Man is alive and dead at the same time. After writing two books of these Dead Man poems, I found myself writing poems called “Sounds of the Resurrected Dead Man’s Footsteps.” So I was hooked. Why? Because by writing about a Dead Man who is also alive, I found darker matter and stickier stuff. In these poems, I am both myself and not myself. The Dead Man is not me but someone who knows a lot about me. I think of him, not as a persona, but as an overarching presence.

This is Dead Man poem number 42. Like many other Dead Man poems, it feels the life force from two sides and, like all Dead Man poems, it has two titled sections:

The Book of the Dead Man (#42)

1. About the Dead Man's Not Telling

The Dead Man encounters horrific conditions infused with beauty.
He looks and sees, dare you see with his unblinkered eyes.
He sniffs and ingests, dare you do the same as he.
He hears and feels, dare you secure such stimuli and endure the heart.
He sets foot on the anomalies, he traverses the interior laden with the screams of witnesses underfoot.
He walks among the pines crackling with the soon-to-be-broken backs of new life.
He freely rests among the appetites of the unsatisfied.
He bites off the head of the Buddha.
The Dead Man has seen bad Buddhahood.
He has doubled back, he has come around, he has cut across, he has taken the long shortcut.
What is out there, that germinates?
The Dead Man knows that there is no luck but dumb luck, no heart that will not skip, no pulse that does not race.
Things go, time goes, while the Dead Man stays.

2. More About the Dead Man's Not Telling

Has not the Dead Man asked a basic question?
Did he not lie in the crib like a question mark without a sentence?
Did he not encode the vitality of roots, the beauty of leaves, the kinetics of branches, the rapture of the sun, the solace of the moon, even the hollow that shapes the seed?
The Dead Man is the one to ask when there is asking.
Those who invest in the past or future shall forfeit the Dead Man's objectivity, his elasticity strung from down-and-dirty to up-and-ready.
When the oracle spoke, the Dead Man listened like a shell.
When the quixotic signaled from the wood, the Dead Man grasped the new life that needed no more plasma than the dew. How comely the horrific consequences, how amiable the gorgeous advantage of the newly born.
Things go, time goes, but the Dead Man goes nowhere without you.
You who told him know what is on the Dead Man's mind.
You at the fringe, the margin, the edge, the border, the outpost, the periphery, the hinterland, you at the extremity, you at the last, counterpoised, have caught the inference.
The Dead Man counts by ones and is shy before your mildest adoration.

Why does poetry matter? Well, Wittgenstein said, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." And poetry pushes the envelope. More important yet, at its best poetry has the ability to express our soul. I think Americans approve of poetry far more than one can tell by book sales, or by how much poetry is read outside the classroom. I think most people sense that a nation’s soul is known by its art.

And art is all about the imagination. As I said earlier, in a time when the human condition is fraught with injustice and tragedy, philosophy and the imagination are not luxuries. They are not just personal pleasures or college electives. They are survival skills, and we ignore them at our peril.

The poet Jack Gilbert imagined the place of writing in society in a poem which he titled, with his tongue in his cheek, "In Dispraise of Poetry":

In Dispraise of Poetry

When the King of Siam disliked a courtier,
He gave him a beautiful white elephant.
The miracle beast deserved such ritual
That to care for him properly meant ruin.
Yet to care for him improperly was worse.
It appears the gift could not be refused.

In other words, like an elephant in a country where such a beast is sacred, poetry--fiction, too--doesn't need a purpose to come into being.

For all the great socio-political issues we cannot escape, it is still true that most young writers, having begun to write for whatever reason, continue because they can't help it. Sometimes it's just the materials that have taken hold of them for what then turns into a lifetime. One of us loves rhythm and sound, another loves stories and character, a third adores syntax, a fourth is passionate for imagery, and a fifth is mad for metaphor. Or maybe we just like the way it feels when we write. We all know many writers who rush to their desks to write so as not to have to do something else.

Along these lines, I want to say something here about the nature of writing classes. I think the most important characteristic of a good writing class is the sense that we are all in this together, students and teacher. Let me tell you a story. It's the '60s, or maybe the early '70s in Iowa City. The crowd that has shown up to hear Allen Ginsberg is far too large for the room. Hundreds of people can't even get inside the door. From the street, we pass the word forward that we are moving to a larger hall. Soon six or seven hundred people are following our little advance group across a greensward when a young man pushes forward to ask Ginsberg a question. "Whaddya think of Creeley's new book?" he asks. That’s the poet, Robert Creeley. By his tone of voice, we can tell that the young man doesn't, himself, care for it. Another disappointed fan. But Ginsberg delivers a terrific response. Turning to the young man, he says, "Whatever Bob's doing, I'm for him." We could use more of that.

Of course we have to acknowledge, again, that we live in a time of great calamities. We cannot blink back the fact that the old Chinese curse--"May you live in an interesting time"--has come down to us with a vengeance. I was wondering aloud about this while out walking with Dorothy. I asked her how I could speak about the thrill of writing and teaching when the world was suffering so badly. Poets would like to write poetry that could prevent wars and feed the hungry and heal the sick, but we can’t. It was a citizen of Sarajevo who, during the so-called “ethnic cleansing,” said, "You owe us for 100,000 dead, but we don't expect to be paid." And indeed there is no payment that would suffice. The poet Wallace Stevens' lovely definition of poetry--"the mind in the act of finding what will suffice"--echoes clangorously in the marketplace of Sarajevo. And in Somalia and Sudan. And in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Israel and the Palestinian territories, and here at home too where there is plenty death and disease.

Well, I was talking about this dilemma to Dorothy as we walked. And eventually Dorothy simply reminded me, as I had forgotten for a moment in the hysteria of the dailies, that it is also necessary to feed our souls.

Here’s a poem that tries to remember that. It is titled “White Clover.” Clover blossoms on our lawns here because they were once pastureland, and the clover remains from the days when cows grazed on it. This poem dates also from about 1982.

White Clover

Once when the moon was out about three-quarters
and the fireflies who are the stars
of backyards
were out about three-quarters
and about three-fourths of all the lights
in the neighborhood
were on because people can be at home,
I took a not so innocent walk
out among the lawns,
navigating by the light of lights,
and there there were many hundreds of moons
on the lawns
where before there was only polite grass.
These were moons on long stems,
their long stems giving their greenness
to the center of each flower
and the light giving its whiteness to the tops
of the petals. I could say
it was light from stars
touched the tops of flowers and no doubt
something heavenly reaches what grows outdoors
and the heads of men who go hatless,
but I like to think we have a world
right here, and a life
that isn’t death. So I don’t say it’s better
to be right here. I say this is where
many hundreds of core-green moons
gigantic to my eye
rose because men and women had sown green grass,
and flowered to my eye in man-made light,
and to some would be as fire in the body
and to others a light in the mind
over all their property.

Whatever the human condition, whatever the particular events in the headlines, writers are people who are helpless not to express their own obsessions and vision in their own way. Writers thrive in a world with more questions than answers. They know that there will always be Dark Matter and Sticky Stuff. That the universe is made of it. That we certainly are.

Poetry wants to live in the world of the sublime, but it can’t avoid the news. Another way to say this might be to say that Dark Matter has unity and Sticky Stuff has depth, and that the former includes black holes of consciousness which suck everything into them and the latter includes quicksand and sinkholes.

I suppose that, if we don’t poison the planet, someday people might live forever—their parts cloned, grown or manufactured. If so, they will wonder what it was like to have been dead. Well, to have been dead, to have known one would die, is to have had a life. Dark Matter and Sticky Stuff: we don’t have to know everything to know enough.

Like anyone who has lived nearly seven decades, I have a feeling for the preeminence of the life force. It is the one pure thing, the most powerful force on the planet, more insistent than civic activity, more irresistible than rationality, more causal than intention. It accounts for the best and worst of us. It must be tempered for the good of society, yet to imprison it takes the life out of life. The arts are an embodiment of the life force and, as such, need not omit the dark matter or the sticky stuff. Yet I confess that there have been times when political circumstances have made it seem that the only poetry appropriate to the moment was silence. I have come to Iowa City this week from Port Townsend, where Dorothy and I sit on the beach almost daily watching the ferry boats, the sailboats, the fishing vessels and container ships, the tugs and barges, and of course the Navy ships. I am finding it difficult to write in these times. Four months ago I managed to write this little poem titled, “Warships Moving Slowly”:

Warships Moving Slowly

Their wake has set the bell-buoy tolling
and put a rumble into the water
under a placid sea holding cloud-shimmer
and a stilted heron angling toward supper.
We are bumps on a log a passing ship
presumes to be pacifists, content to be
shaping the sublime as only safe quarters
permit, its weapons unable to fathom
the rage that soaks the sand at night
with such black blood as darkness weeps
and of which we are part, good citizens
held incommunicado by the tide.

The phrase “Arts and Humanities” has a moral cast to it. When the very character of this country is up for grabs, it may seem a luxury to care for such things, yet it remains fitting that we celebrate the arts and humanities, which are, after all, the soul of a nation. The arts and humanities, like the imagination itself—let me say it again--are also survival skills. Even in calamitous times, people will lift a glass, sing and dance to celebrate a birth or an anniversary. It takes individual, social and political courage to care for the soul of a nation. I would like to think that someday, in our country, support for the arts and the humanities, and the values they embody, will be nonpartisan.

I’ll end with another short poem, this one from a book published earlier this year. The title of the book is Rampant, and the title of the poem is “Around Us”:

Around Us

We need some pines to assuage the darkness
when it blankets the mind,
we need a silvery stream that banks as smoothly
as a plane's wing, and a worn bed of
needles to pad the rumble that fills the mind,
and a blur or two of a wild thing
that sees and is not seen. We need these things
between appointments, after work,
and, if we keep them, then someone someday,
lying down after a walk
and supper, with the fire hole wet down,
the whole night sky set at a particular
time, without numbers or hours, will cause
a little sound of thanks--a zipper or a snap--
to close round the moment and the thought
of whatever good we did.