Greetings to all of you. It's a pleasure to be here, of course -- and it's more than an ordinary pleasure, in that when Kathy Mills first called to invite me to participate in this illustrious Monday Night series, I assumed that I'd be asked to speak about the experience of working closely with Helen Nearing as the editor for her memoir, Loving and Leaving the Good Life. No, not exactly, said Kathy: we're actually inviting you to come and read poems.

What luck! Over the course of the past year, I've had the opportunity to work closely with a number of people involved in the Good Life Center as part of an effort to create a durable, ongoing publishing program, which ideally will be a reliable source of revenues to continue the work of the Nearings. As I've learned more about the Good Life Center, I've come to understand that the Monday Night series and the other educational projects of the Center are not intended primarily to inculcate a reverential or elegiac view of Helen and Scott. To the contrary, and to the credit of the many people who have worked so hard since Helen's death to create an energetic program here, the task is much more in keeping with the Nearings own approach to livelihood, activism, and world service. It's up to us to carry on, each in his or her own way. The hours I spent with Helen at that table by the wide window ("not looking at each other, but looking in the same direction," as Rilke said, meaning the task at hand) underscored this for me. The world around us is a place of enormous pain and possibility. Each of us who recognizes the necessity must find a way to become one of the restorers of life, instead of enlisting in the ranks of the destroyers. When in the midst of struggling over some passage in the book that Helen felt wasn't coming clear, she suddenly took up my hand in her two hands and studied my palm. Ah, she said, tracing the head line: You've come into this life to do certain things, and you're doing them. I knew as she said this that I wanted it to be true; it was somewhat true, and it could be more true. Helen's way was to put a question back in the question-poser's hands. My way (as editor, writer, and political citizen) is to want to find words that will serve a specific need and situation.

I've called my talk "Poetry as Compass." The constructions in language I love most are essentially playful, even when responding to urgencies that are desperate. As Robert Frost says in the conclusion of his paean to wood-splitting -- one of many Frost poems you can read repeatedly over years, and never exhaust --

This is akin to the words of Czeslaw Milosz, who is the living poet whose work I love most:

And what is a compass? As a child, I loved compasses. I had one (I still have it, as you see) that was easy to carry in a pocket, with a string around the neck. Flat as tablet, with a rotating dial. At its center a shallow basin of water, with some a kind of esprit in the middle, the proverbial "ghost in the machine," an animated needle that can't rest, that will swivel and spin on its pivot as you turn, seeking alignment with the northern magnetic axis of the globe beneath our feet. I carry it in the woods, and I carry it when hiking for hours up and down sidewalks in unfamiliar cities. No cord, no battery, no buttons or antenna. A device both mechanical and alchemical. A piece of technology that cannot be "improved upon."

Likewise, a poem. Because the word "technology" has come to connote space shuttles and CAT scan machines, software and genetic engineering, it may sound startling to say that poetry is a technology. Yet unlike the seemingly limitless proliferation of gadgets and procedures glutting industrialized society, think of the poem as a technology more comparable to a chair, a scissors, a shirt, or a broom. These relatively simple inventions, which have changed hardly at all in function or even design, aside from changes in materials, are recognizable and reliable. One can construct them by hand, from memory. And as I said of the compass, it's not easy to "improve upon" the traditional chair, scissors, shirt, or broom -- and in fact, many of the older ones still work best.

I often think about the ways a poem can also be as useful as an ordinary household implement -- a tool for cutting or sweeping away detritus, a well-worn, comfortable piece of clothing, a device for relocating oneself when disoriented on a wooded slope or city street. And not only for dealing with immediate surroundings. A poem can move through time, through space, can penetrate or puncture the membrane between what is real and what is merely seen. This membrane is a border too often presumed to be impermeable, though it isn't. I love that other sense of the word, "compass" -- a range, or circumference: what is within reach of touch or imagination, what lies within the embrace of a circle inscribed by that other type of compass, the ancient Egyptian and Babylonian mathematical instrument, a pivoting pair of legs with stylus or pencil on one side, for inscribing circles and angles or measuring intervals. As John Donne wrote, utilizing the compass for an exemplary conceit: "Thy firmness makes my circle just,/ And makes me end, where I begun."

You can tell that I enjoy devising then extending analogies, perhaps almost to the breaking point. Even so, I'd like to read you some examples of actual poems. Such as these are incantations one can use, day in and day out, to solve problems and execute tasks, to plumb the past or augur the future.

I'm going to read "Wife Hits Moose." It's very easy to understand, but I should note that towards the end the poet is tweaking a slightly affected yet functional convention of contemporary poetry workshops, whereby the narrator is asserted to be not necessarily the writer him- or herself, not exactly, but rather the "quote-unquote" speaker of the poem.

This is a poem by Thomas Lux, written in the early 1980s, probably under the influence of "wise-cracking philosophical expressionists such as John Berryman and Frank O'Hara. Its diction is odd and arresting, a mix of traditional literary mannerism and bureaucratic "reportage," like an insurance claim filed by an Augustan barrister. Its setting is clear, the description although spare is vivid and memorable, and even the sudden sundering at the end, a Brechtian "breaking of the frame " while abrupt and outlandish, is plausible -- rendering sensations a reader recognizes, not merely cerebral but palpable, in a natural and likable speaking voice. This is a poem written in what has imprecisely come to be known as "free verse," in which the more obvious attributes of historical verse (recurrent meter and periodic rhyme, for example) have been subordinated to conversational phrasing, a different type of rhythmical organization, and visual intensity. Yet the poem is most decidedly not prose. It moves and operates other-wise.

I'm assuming that many people in this audience do not make a daily custom of reading poems. Whether I'm accurate or inaccurate in that assumption, I'm sure it's worth taking a moment to re-establish the acquaintance of the basic elements of a poem. I recently made three visits to the kindergarten class in our town, and in each session I read a couple of poems and the students drew pictures to help articulate what they noticed and enjoyed in the poems. The children also said "Ding!" when they heard either a rhyme or a "comparison," since we had talked about how some poems are particularly engaged in music (rhythms and rhymes) and some are particularly engaged by metaphors (similes and analogies, sometimes signaled by the word "like," sometimes not). Let's start with an Emily Dickinson poem that's filled with comparisons. Please feel welcome to say "Ding!"

Notice the metaphors, not on the surface but embedded like the poem's very musculature: the wind tapping like a man, "a Rapid – footless guest" with "no Bone . . . to bind him" and with "Speech . . . like the Push / of numerous Humming Birds at once / From a superior Bush." The comparisons layer one upon another, this portrait of the wind: "His Countenance – a Billow – / His Fingers, as He passed / Let go a music – as of tunes / Blown tremulous in Glass – . . ." The more you think and feel your way through this evocation, the more it becomes both tactile and hallucinatory. Some readers will notice that on the page the capitalized He is reminiscent of the conventional capitalization of the Christian deity, and some who notice the unexpected and welcome hilarity of the passage: "To offer whom a Chair / Were as impossible as hand / A Sofa to the Air – . . ."

Now let's hear a poem that's almost intoxicating in its rhythms and rhymes. With the children, I read Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" (which several of them could recite by memory after only one hearing!). With adults I often read a poem that's a bit lustier, Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Recuerdo" or more unnerving despite its chamber-music resonance, Thomas Hardy's "During Wind and Rain". Say "Ding!" if you like (oh, go ahead . . .):

These are poems enriched enormously by the sonorous resources of the language -- consider, for instance the succession of vowels through which the phrases cohere and seem to "sing" -- yet both are poems permeated with the grief of a seasoned awareness of how ephemeral life's youthful joys can seem. Neither Millay nor Hardy is merely musical in these examples. Their poems are striking in visual vividness as well, and notice how a certain bittersweet nostalgia is countered by modern and urban details. Ultimately, the reason I present these as instances of sublimely "aural" poetry is that overall, the power of the poems' implied dramatic situations and imagery is inseparable from the profound musicality of the writing.

For comparison, another poem that approaches somewhat the same subject as Hardy's "During Wind and Rain" with a rather more terse strain of music is Philip Larkin's poem, "Days." You'll hear the bareness of the phrasing, but also the riddle-like wryness:

In addition to the metaphorical and musical modes, a third broad category of poetry is the narrative, a tradition spanning back to Gilgamesh and The Odyssey -- our daughter was awestruck at the thought that some poems took weeks to recite aloud -- and revived with great verve in recent years, perhaps partly as a stratagem for being accessible to readers predisposed by popular fiction toward strong characters and dramatic situation and away from the seemingly "ornamental" or "symbolical" arcanum of verse. Here is Ellen Bryant Voigt's poem "The Trust."

It's unjust to speak of this amazing evocation mainly with reference to its "story," as Voigt is audibly a virtuoso in tones, sounds, and cadences as well as exposition. And see how her metaphors are inlaid, as smooth as parquet. Of course, many poems draw upon all of these assets -- metaphors and musical phrasing, with dramatic intensity developed either implicitly "between the lines" or explicitly as narrative -- which I have delineated here for the sake of contemplation.

The most powerful poems are multifariously inventive (perhaps lavishly, perhaps transparently so): sonically and linguistically complex, rhythmical, metaphorical, and intense with dramatic. Coming back to this notion of the "technology" of poetry, it's important to remember that poems are language with a maximum imaginable sensitivity per cubic iota, like a force field of nerves, like a magnetized needle spinning on a dial. Even a very spartan, elliptical poem (such as one finds among the ancient Chinese masters) can be dense with the presence of what goes unsaid, what is between the lines.

That, written by an English cleric in 1648! It can only be read with a gasp . . .

I could do this all night, and all day tomorrow, and on into next week. "Had we but world enough, and time . . .", I would read you Frost's "To Earthward" and "Directive," Paul Celan's "Hymn," Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," Milosz's "Preparation," Yeats's "The Cat and the Moon" and "Prayer for My Daughter," Stephen Dobyns's "Spiritual Chickens" and "How to Like It," Robert Pinsky's "The Shirt," and Heather McHugh's "The Trouble with 'In'," as well as poems by Ezra Pound, Seamus Heaney, Jorie Graham, Adrienne Rich, Hayden Carruth, Louise Glück, Paul Blackburn, Charles Wright, Denise Levertov, and Zbigniew Herbert. Staggering, demanding, but readily accessible poems. And notably missing from my recitations so far are examples of poems that embody the political eloquence and fury so well tended at the hearth of this Nearing household.

We're living is a epoch of unprecedented richness and diversity in poetry. There are now in publication poets whose work would ravish any conceivable sensibility, temperament, or sense of humor, if only we remembered to look and listen.

But I would be a fool to miss the opportunity to read some of my own poems, so I will do so. Let me close this part of the program with a lovely evocation of an encompassed world unto itself, yet a world in and of the larger universe. This is "Eaton's Boatyard," by Castine, Maine poet Philip Booth, a work of art that brought me to this place, here and now, this stretch of Cape Rozier coastline, years before I ever visited in person: