Why Poems?

My career as a writer began in poetry.  I have a bachelor’s degree in poetry from Northwestern and a master’s degree in poetry from the writing seminars at Johns Hopkins—about as fine a formal education as one can possibly have in the poetic arts.  I taught poetry for years and years, to students in both middle school and college, and then—sadly—I became disenchanted with the genre.

In time, however, I learned that it wasn’t poetry itself that I fell out of love with—it was being a poet.  The work was so solitary, so ascetic, so minimal: words compressed into diamonds, then cut and set in platinum.  (The good stuff, anyway, not what passes for poetry these days, most of which strikes me as rubbish.)  I need collaboration.  I need immediacy.  I need ritual.  Theater gave me all those things.

But poems—oh, poems… they still make me swoon.  I keep going back to them, even though it’s been more than a decade since I wrote one, and reading them when I most need inspiration.  I think the rhythmic way I wrote—the lyric tradition in which I was educated—continues to make its mark on my dialogue today.  Symbol, too, is immeasurably important in my dramatic work.  Some of what I learned I still rely on.

“It is difficult to get the news from poems,” write William Carlos Williams, “yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”  Maybe I found exactly what I needed.