The Brooklyn Rail

Perhaps best known for his award-winning short fiction (Off in Zimbabwe), as well as for his nonfiction, Rod Kessler belongs to a genus of prose stylists who also compose verse poems, a prestigious subgroup that includes some of the finest writers of the language. There are those, like James Joyce, Patrick White, and William Faulkner, whose poetry collections appear as their earliest published work, providing what seems an important step in their quest to forge innovative prose. For others, such as Grace Paley, Alice Walker, Raymond Carver, and Margaret Atwood, their various poetry collections appear throughout the timelines of their respective oeuvres, suggesting that the balance sustained by switching between the two genres is not only possible but likely an important source of stimulation. “In my own case,” Kessler shares in the discussion below, “what drew me to writing poetry is what often draws people to writing poetry: heartache and trouble.” Through the last four decades, the “ultimate compression” required of the best lyric poetry has served as an ideal (if-only occasional) container for some of his most intimate and personal reflections.

The resulting poems have been collected in Self-Portrait with Tree, a modest-sized chapbook that includes some of Kessler’s clever drawings. Using clean lines and accessible diction, Kessler’s idiom is warm, immediate, and remarkably accommodating. His poems tackle a wide range of themes without sacrificing the integrity of his voice. They do not succumb to contortion or strain. Rather, the poet’s phrasing invites us into his confidence. “Somewhere not exactly on the map,” begins the poem “Somewhere South of Miami”—and I, as reader, trust him to guide me into those uncertain terrains.

The ensuing exchange foregrounds Kessler’s concerns with poetic craft, as well as the stories surrounding the composition of several of Self-Portrait with Tree’s poems. However, his influence and importance exceed the boundaries of our conversation. As The Brooklyn Rail Books editor Joseph Salvatore explains, “For decades Rod was a beloved writing teacher at Salem State University. I began working with him as an undergraduate and then as a graduate student through the mid-eighties until I left Salem to pursue an MFA in NYC in 1996. For nearly a decade, I took many classes with Rod — fiction, poetry, nonfiction — all of which genres he wrote and published in. Most significantly, I took several courses Rod offered on the subjects of grammar and style. To all of his students, he was the maestro; he taught not merely the rules of grammar (which he knew thoroughly) but, more significantly, he taught us how to see those grammatical choices as rhetorical tools for the writer to construct sentences with precision and clarity. Not only is Rod one of the great teachers of my educational life, but he’s one of the most perceptive and careful editors I’ve ever had. Whether he was offering sentence-level feedback on my workshop submissions or offering publishing and editorial advice as the faculty advisor for the college literary magazine, Rod offered students and writers something much more valuable than how to write error-free copy; he offered us agency over our education and ownership of the birthright that is our very own language.” As Salvatore’s testimony reveals, Rod Kessler’s lifelong contributions to American letters, within and beyond the classroom, mean the publication of Self-Portrait with Tree has importance beyond the certain pleasures its poems afford.

Tony Leuzzi (Rail): Hi Rod. So glad you were able to set aside some of your time to discuss your new poetry book, Self-Portrait with Tree. The collection amasses poems you have written across a span of several decades, which means the reader can track your journey as a writer of verse as a lifetime project. Before we begin discussing particular aspects of the collection, I’m curious to know the kind of role poetry—and specifically the writing of poetry—has for you in your long career as a writer of stories. Like many fiction writers who occasionally turn to verse, I’m assuming you feel there are some ideas or concepts you can more effectively work out through poetry as opposed to fiction. Would this be a fair thing to assume? If so, I’d love to know more about how genre switching serves you as a writer and thinker.

Rod Kessler (Kessler): Why would a fiction writer ever or even occasionally turn to writing poetry? The answers will vary from writer to writer, but there’s one constant: it’s not for the money. For some writers, technique and form definitely come into it: the allure of compression that poetry promises—its economy of imagery—draws in writers who, working with words, working with so many words, wish to get beyond words, such clumsy, often imprecise tools. There’s an esthetic that sees as the highest art communicating with the least verbiage. Take the blank page as the ideal. Well, the blank page isn’t writing, but—according to this standard—it’s not easy to improve it, though we must.

I’m reminded of a poem by Malcolm Miller, the eccentric poet from my town, Salem, Mass.:

And what was it but the wish for ultimate compression that sparked Hemingway’s six-word prose piece: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” There’s a parallel in music, that wish to hone craft to the very point of silence, as with John Cage’s “4’33”—over four minutes of orchestral silence.

What I’m getting at is the allure of poetry just from the perspective of craft. Poetry and fiction—the original edition of Robert Frost’s North of Boston was fifty pages. My copy of War and Peace is 1215. Apples and oranges? More like diamonds and fields of peat.

But having said all this, I’d be more honest confessing that in my own case, what drew me to writing poetry is what often draws people to writing poetry: heartache and trouble. In his poem about Yeats, Auden asserts that “Ireland hurt you into poetry.” In some of my poems, it was other things that hurt me into poetry, especially lost love—or should I say losing love, something I seem to have had a knack for years ago. Lonely, alone, full of angst, I sat down to the writing table.

Not all of the poems in Self-Portrait with Tree came about that way, not even most of them. As a college-level creative writing teacher, I often found myself articulating the elements of craft in writing poetry, especially in introductory classes but also in graduate-level writing workshops. How could I hold my head up in such circumstances without producing poems of my own?

And there’s another source worth mentioning. I created a character in a novel who is intended to be a brilliant if iconoclastic feminist poet. I hope they’re approaching plausible brilliance and not laughably bad, but “her” poems are also in Self-Portrait.

Rail: I did notice a number of poems from Self-Portrait address loneliness, aloneness, and/or some deeply personal hurt. Sometimes contexts are wholly clarified; other times, the “heartache and trouble” that has prompted you to write the poem is articulated through an I-you dynamic, where the speaker addresses someone with whom he is on intimate terms. (I’m thinking in particular of “Pathetic Fallacy” and “Late Delivery” but there may be others.) In those poems, the I and you are bound in ways the reader only partially sees. I sense this is deliberate and am fascinated by your decision to keep some of the context private, foregrounding the “angst” instead. Can you discuss some of your reasons for structuring the poems this way?

Kessler: I like to think that we fiction writers turned poets are reliably accessible. And yet, in the case of “Pathetic Fallacy,” the specifics of the background story—clearly, there’s a relationship coming to a hurtful end—are anyone’s guess. Does the poem leave readers unsatisfied on this score? Maybe the matter could have been resolved by a better title? “If she’s blind to her own issues, I’m even more clueless.”

In “Late Delivery,” the dedication suggests the you, my kid brother who died young (on a basketball court). What prompted this poem was an actual dream, a dream that gave me the illusion of momentarily reconnecting with the dead, albeit a dispassionate if not an actually disturbing reconnection—“the letter you sent me.”  The God who shows up is definitely the Old Testament kind, despite having His little Son.

The line about Susan Monsky “who told me / not three weeks ago to drown / myself in a bathtub”?  She was a Boston-area writing pal with whom—at least in the dream—I’d had a falling out. I don’t remember. But what I do remember was that in the original draft, the draft accepted by Anima, the line read “. . . to fuck / myself in a bathtub,” and yet when the magazine arrived, the verb had been sanitized.  I’ve made my peace with the change (but since when do the editors of literary magazines get to make changes like that, without asking?).

As for my decision to structure the poems this way, I haven’t a good answer. Naturally, I was familiar with the long tradition of poems-as-dialogue or addressed to a “you.” In high school we read both “My Last Duchess” and “Daddy.” But as is the case with much of my writing, not a lot of premeditation went into form. I was buoyed years ago reading Flannery O’Connor’s essays on writing. For her, form “was organic,” emerging from the material itself. Perhaps this is only to say that as writers we trust our unconscious to make such decisions. Or perhaps it’s to say that the tools of literary analysis and criticism are not always in the writer’s toolbox (or, at least, in mine.)

Rail: The collection features a number of poems originally published years ago in high-quality journals, including Ploughshares, which continues to represent some of the best poetry being written today. How do you feel the poems in Self-Portrait relate or converse with poems being written and published today? 

Kessler: Funny that you should ask about Ploughshares, which in 1986 published “Apartheid.” That’s the most prestigious of the magazines my poetry made it into. The back story might interest some of Brooklyn Rail’s readers. When I submitted that piece, I had no idea who at Ploughshares would read the submission. But when the issue appeared, it turned out that the issue’s guest editor was the poet Tess Gallagher. Well, just a handful of years earlier, I had sat in as a fiction student in her poetry seminar at the University of Arizona’s MFA program, and she had applauded an essay I had turned in, even quoting from it in a piece she later wrote for the American Poetry Review. So, I was left wondering whether “Apartheid” was really good enough for Ploughshares or had I simply benefited, albeit unawares, from whom I knew.

As for whether the poems in Self-Portrait with Tree relate to or converse with the poetry written today, it’s evident that some poems feel dated—like the ones referring to Apartheid and the bombing of Hiroshima. Happily, though, the misery of lost love as well as our human mortality—these themes are timeless.

As for contemporary poetry—and my bookshelf runneth over—there’s an enormous range of styles and approaches out there, perhaps far more than enough given the scarcity of readers. I’m confident that within that crowd of readers some will admire and enjoy the accessibility of my writing. As I’ve said, Fiction-writing poets have that going for them, accessibility. As for any future prospects, time winnows the field, winnows and winnows, as it should. I don’t expect to be among the immortals.

Rail: Some of your poems are cleverly constructed as brilliant one-offs that feel like strikes of lightning. Whatever idea or emotion prompted them has been so intricately tied to your conception of the poem’s form that they are less novelties and more expert sleights-of-hand. I’m thinking of “Final Exam” (which opens the collection) and “Self-Portrait with Tree.” The former poem unfurls as a multiple-choice test that, like Julio Cortazar’s novel Hopscotch, enables the reader to envision several possible scenarios and outcomes emerging from the various possible paths the choices offer. The latter poem is triggered by the speaker’s meditation on a specific tree with a trunk so wide it would require three of him to wholly embrace it; the final three lines suggest that the multiple selves within the self may be game to try. Could you discuss your thoughts about these poems—and possibly consider how you realized their ingenious constructions?

Kessler: Your asking how I realized the construction of these poems brings to mind a story about William Butler Yeats. Yeats lived long enough to have been recorded, albeit primitively, in the 1930s. On the LP Spoken Arts recording, he asserts, before reciting “The Lake Isles of Innisfree” that his listeners will expect him to begin with it “because it is the only poem of mine very widely known.” He was 23 when he wrote it and 67 when he recorded it for posterity. He claims that the poem has only one obscure passage, the bit about “noon a purple glow.” He makes a stab at explaining what he meant, but after 44 years it’s clear that he isn’t really sure.

And so with me, too. Forty years have passed since I wrote some of these poems. I can’t promise to be really sure.  “Final Exam,” the poem that appears on the page like a multiple-choice test, probably grew out my teaching students about “found poems”—texts of one sort or another discovered out in the world that work as poetry, however unintended. Recipes sometimes approach poetry as do other lists. I might have asked my students to find a recipe or set of instructions or a meeting agenda and nudge it into poetry. “Final Exam” was my own experiment. Devising actual multiple-choice exams was certainly up my alley.

This poem also illuminates one of poetry’s tensions, that between the poem on the page and the poem in the ear. Does this poem work if it’s only heard, not seen? I like to think that the ending works, anyway.

“Self-Portrait with Tree” is not the only tree poem in the collection, and trees come into the drawings too. The tree in this poem is an actual tree and a famous one. Google wasn’t around when I wrote it, but if it were I’d have known that it’s the largest sycamore in Massachusetts, over 300 years old, and called the Buttonball tree. I was living as a graduate student in Whately (Mass), just across the Connecticut River from Sunderland, where I couldn’t help noticing this amazingly large sycamore. I had no idea that it was famous. I’ve taken liberties with the truth here—the trunk is so large that it would probably take eight of me to encircle it, not just three. (There are pictures online.)

The thing is, when I stopped along Route 47 and got out of my car to encounter this tree, I think I did hug it. And I think I did imagine how many of me that it would take to ring it, and that image of me and me and me implanted itself. In this instance, form really was organic.

Rail: I was going to hold off until later on asking about the line drawings dispersed throughout Self-Portrait with Tree, but since you have mentioned them, let’s discuss them now. I’m usually turned off by poetry collections that feature drawings, paintings, or other two-dimensional mediums, but I enjoyed the presence of your drawings here, many of which are lightly-satirical (the “How’s life?/How’s art?” drawing on page 20 and the one in the therapist’s office on page 27 come to mind), though there are others, such as the woman leaning against a wall (page 15) that are more pensive and evocative. In either case, I welcomed the appearance of them on certain pages. Also, I really dug the interactive invitation on the back cover where a rendering of you holds up a paper and wonders: “What if I asked you for a blurb?” What is the story behind the artwork included here? How do you see the drawings interacting with the poems? When, in the process of putting Self-Portrait with Tree together, did you decide to include them?

Kessler: Including the drawings was at the suggestion of the editor at Winter Island Press. For that matter, putting this collection of poems into print was also at the suggestion of the editor at Winter Island Press, Maile Black. Full disclosure: I’m married to her, a fact that explains how she came upon the poems and stories in the first place. But if there was some arm-twisting involved, it wasn’t much.

About the drawings themselves, though: I’ve been at it for as long as I can remember. My mother, whatever her shortcomings as parent and person, was a Pratt Institute-trained painter, a lifelong practitioner in oils and acrylics, so in my world artmaking was a given. (Although she came to repudiate formal art-school schooling, I can still recall her saying, “Try doing more to vary your line.”)

I had no training but developed a facility capturing likenesses by sketching my professors and whatever else caught my eye while sitting—restless—in lectures. My college notebooks are sketchbooks. A drawing I did in a writing seminar as a grad student appears as an illustration in James Hepworth’s tribute to our teacher, Resist Much Obey Little: Remembering Ed Abbey. It caricatured Abbey, hand outstretched, amid the writers in that late-afternoon Tucson classroom.  Alas, once I moved from the student’s seat to the front of the room, my sketching career ended.

There’s more to it that’s pertinent to the matter of writing. We MFA students at the University of Arizona mostly ate, slept, and worked in our writing. It’s what many of us probably knew most about. Even running the track in the evening at Catalina High School, chances are I was jogging alongside Jonathan Penner, one of my workshop teachers, who would say things like, “In a story, Rod, you don’t want to start at the beginning—you want to start with the reader’s heart in your hands.” Yet in workshop, we looked askance at stories whose protagonists were writers. Being so self-referential was taboo, like writing poems about writing poetry.

So, one wanted to have command, if only for writing purposes, of a parallel art. Instead of a would-be writer at their center, my stories sometimes had a would-be cartoonist. And I drew cartoons. Just four days ago I was pruning my too-crowded bookshelves for items to donate to my town’s book swap and came across a duplicate copy of the initial issue of Sonora Review, a magazine still in business 45 years later. Flipping through it I was surprised to see not one but two of my cartoons included, drawings I’d long forgotten about. (The masthead contained another surprise: I was listed as the nonfiction editor, but the issue contained no nonfiction.)

I’ve had some ideas for cartoons. A man on his bent knee holds out a diamond to a young beauty and asks, “Will you be my first wife?”  In another, a fellow boasts to his friend, “I missed my graduations, but I attended all my weddings.” More recently, this—our President announcing his latest revision to the world map, in which “Greenland” has been crossed out and replaced by “Crimea.”

If I had ideas like these every day, I might have been a cartoonist. But they come only one or two a year.

It pleases me that the drawings are included in the book, if only because doing so rescues them from obscurity. Certainly, they also communicate the poet’s vision, if I might be allowed a self-conception so grandiose! At least they share with some of the poetry the occasional whimsy and openness.

The placement of the drawings in the book was out of my hands. Maybe there’s no rhyme or reason to it?  I like to think that the illustrations serve as resting stations, places of pause, palate-clearers for the mind, between poems. And there’s this: maybe the point was to add a few pages, to pad a book still too thin to have its title on the spine.

Rail: One of my favorite poems in the collection is called “Eating the Dead,” which I will now quote in full:

Like many of the best poems I’ve read, this poem is so direct and accessible that almost anyone could enter it and immediately understand its tensions. At the same time, there are so many micro stories within the larger story that animate the poem and give it an impressive breadth. I zoomed in on Dave Edgar and then May Sarton, though any number of the people referred to here had full lives beyond this poem. As a reader, I move down the poem and trace the speaker’s argument, but I also pause in parts to ponder the thumbnail sketches the speaker provides. I don’t have a question, per se. More of a “thank you.” I’m hoping you can discuss this poem in more depth.

Kessler: If I’d written this poem now instead of half a lifetime ago—Ed Abbey died in 1989; May Sarton, 1995—it would be a lot longer. Our relationship with the dead changes as we age, at least mine does. At seventy-five, I’m much more aware that death doesn’t only ever happen to someone else. And more and more I’m at peace with that. The poet John Holmes, one of Anne Sexton’s teachers, wrote a terrific poem on the subject, “The Fear of Dying,” which appeared oddly enough, just as I was born, in 1949. It ran in the Atlantic. He was about the same age –forty-five—as I was writing “Eating the Dead.”

The dead in this poem were my dead, the dead I had known in life. To the world, most were no one special, my grandfather (although he evidently was a good Communist), my little brother (see “Late Delivery”), David Edgar and Martin Etter (my closest friends in high school and college respectively). Peggy was the lovable, sweet kid-sister of a one-time girlfriend, now also felled by cancer.

Abbey and Sarton were, of course, well-known writers. Abbey had been one of my teachers at Arizona, and we grew close enough for him to invite me to call him “Ed” instead of the “Mr. Abbey” he expected of students, even MFA graduate students. In 1982, May Sarton spoke at Phillips Exeter Academy in 1982, the year that I was the Bennett Fellow—the writer in residence. I was asked to escort her.  She took a shine to me and invited me every few months to come up to York, Maine, and have lunch. She saw me as a grandson figure, if there is such a thing. Some years later when we brought her to read at Salem State, her reputation was such that we had to move the reading to the largest room on campus, the main stage auditorium, something never done before nor after. She filled every seat. May Sarton. Now, no one has ever heard of her. Go figure.

“Eating the Dead” hadn’t been published prior to its appearance in this book. It could be that I never sent it off. Was it too personal? Too idiosyncratic? Why should anyone care about Harry, “my Zaida,” or David Edgar, who worked on submarines along the Connecticut shore? But I remember now that a colleague of mine at Salem State, not an English professor but someone in what used to be called the Foreign Languages Department, after hearing it read at one of our annual faculty readings, asked for a copy and then, time after time, would tell me how much the poem meant to her. And that was Kristine Doll, who would go on to publish books of poetry and of translation herself and win both the Pjetër Bogdani Prize for Poetry, awarded by the International Writers Association, and the Homer European Medal of Poetry. Maybe I should have sent it off somewhere?

Rail: Another favorite of mine from your collection, “Doing Without,” is a poem in which the speaker has lost one of his winter gloves. This prompts him to remember as a child, reading a book about a French boy who has lost the Do in his Do Rei Me. The last few lines are:

Here was a puzzle. Where would you have to go
to find his insubstantial do? Suppose
you had to find it. Would you drum the air?
I’d try it gloveless, raw-boned; fingers bare.

You really strike a great balance here between lightly humorous and deeply moving. Anyway, this is one of several poems in Self-Portrait with Tree that involves a boy—and this seems like an important sub-theme in the book. What does “boy” conjure for you and why do you think boys make frequent appearances here?

Kessler: I’m pleased that you enjoyed the humor of the whimsical “Doing Without,” a poem whose very title is a pun. It developed as a model for the creative writing classroom, a piece meant to illustrate “musicality” and also to pose a dynamic between hidden (unstressed) rhyming and the stressed kind. This poem is fun to read aloud, indeed is meant to be. There’s fun, I think, in the placing of the very weak “of” at its line’s end—and it getting something out of it, that rhyme with “glove.” I’ve advised student writers never to end lines with an “of” (or with a “the” or an “a,” and so on), yet here the exception seems to prove the rule.

Is the poem also serious, also “moving”?  I’m not sure, unless it is in underscoring how life inevitably is tied to loss, both the tangible kind (that glove) and the intangible (that insubstantial do).

Rail: Perhaps you aren’t sure, but I find it unambiguously moving. That the adult speaker’s loss of the glove triggers something much deeper, ie: a child’s connection to loss, is significant and foundational, even in the realm of the playful punning you’ve established.

Kessler: There actually was a tangible loss here—a real glove lost during a real winter. I’ve a long history of losing gloves, so keeping a pair for three winters was a feat. I soon found myself collecting stray gloves as I made my way through the world. I actually thumbtacked lost gloves to a campus bulletin board, hoping that their owners could reunite with them. And I started keeping count of the kinds of gloves I was finding. I took photographs and thought of writing an essay. Did you know that the vast majority of lost gloves is right-handed gloves—the dominant-hand glove? With so many orphan gloves in my possession, I took to wearing mismatched or vaguely matched pairs.

But I invented the part about a book about a French boy who lost le dot de son clarinet. Pure fabrication. There’s a popular kids’ song in France with that title, but in that version the French for clarinet is given correctly—clarinette. (And I should have written sa clarinette, not son. As we say in English, “Oops.”)

Had I known that clarinet was feminine, I might have made it a French girl. But boys? My heart goes out to the little kid in “The Deaf Boy,” with those “putty-colored plastic slugs” encircling his ears, but I don’t think that in this collection “boy” serves as thematic through-line. Yes, there’s also the poem “Little Boy,” but that really was the nickname for the A-bomb that melted Hiroshima. The bomb that blasted Nagasaki was Fat Man. “Little Boy” does face “The Deaf Boy” in the book, though, so I can see how the question comes up.

Rail: In your “Preface” to the second printing of Self-Portrait with Tree, you mention your unpublished novel Edelman Unsung. Among the novel’s characters is “a poet—mercurial, sometimes strident, sometimes witty, feminist poet.” A handful of poems from Self-Portrait are authored by this character, your invention. Within the context of the novel, I am guessing these poems illuminate the character and contribute to the overall plot. In what ways do you see the poems independent of the novel? Do they read differently? Are they tonally different, perhaps? Is there a way in which the poems even benefit from their separation from the novel?

Kessler: The hero of my gloriously and stubbornly unpublished novel has two loves in his life, the nineteenth-century British novelist Walter Carling (a fictionalized, thinly disguised Thomas Hardy) and the tantalizing, unpossessable poet Raine Jones. Edelman is a last-minute hire at an undistinguished non-elite college where his Carling seminar is dropped due to low enrollment, leaving him with four sections of Comp. The poet operates as a muse of iconoclasm and non-compliance, and toward the end of the novel, with no help from Edelman, she descends on the campus as its major visiting poet.

It is through her poems that the reader is meant to know her fire and vitality—her defiance.  Writing her poems was a challenge. I was helped and encouraged in the process by my one-time grad school pal, the poet Tony Hoagland, under whom I worked briefly at the Vermont Studio Center.  He’s dead now and won’t mind my telling stories on him. He certainly thought that Raine Jones’s poems could stand on their own and suggested that I submit them for publication under her name. And so, I did. Both “Word Problem” and “Soapbox” originally appeared in print under her name.

“Her” poems tonally are different from my other poems—so much so that I won’t claim them as mine à la “I am a multitude, I contain many.” No, they are persona poems, but in the sense that it’s the poet who’s the persona. Many poems are autobiographical, expressing the writer’s soul and angst and all that. But they needn’t be. Maybe it’s a good challenge. Imagine being someone very different from yourself and write her (his, their) poems.

Alas, the inclusion of these poems possibly muddies the unity of my book.

Rail: Rod, you’ve been so generous with your time and responses this week. I really appreciate you and your work. I’m wondering what, if any, writing projects are on the horizon for you. Do you see yourself writing more fiction? More poems? 

Kessler: Maybe it’s only an illusion that the sands of the hourglass pour out most quickly at the end, but so it seems with aging: never before have the days raced by so quickly. Never before has the hour flashed by so fast. What used to last sixty minutes seems now no more than forty. If there’s a finish line up ahead, the distance to it is quickly narrowing. So, it’s with urgency that I look ahead, even as I also yearn to go at my own slow pace—a pace I need to adopt just to be at peace, much less to be productive.

Given a diminishing future, where does writing fit in? It must mean something that I still keep the 600 pages of my unpublished novel in a box on the floor beside my bed, never having gotten around to moving it to the basement. Shall I give it a final look-over and revision? It wasn’t intended as an historical novel, yet its characters live in a now foreign-seeming world without laptops, without the Internet, without cell phones. Must I go to the grave leaving it all behind in a cardboard box?

As for new work, whether poetry or prose, I’m not sanguine, but who knows what the Muse has in store for me? Well, here’s what I really suspect: some time ago, maybe fifteen years ago, maybe twenty, maybe more, the Muse did appear to me. She sat me down and said, “Kessler, I’m going to give you a choice. You can suffer in life and live as a solitary, lonely, unfulfilled, and emotionally hungry—yet also live deeply self-contained in your art, and be endlessly prolific, endlessly creative. Or, you can have a life of love and fulfillment, enjoying the bliss of the marital bed, having your lifelong hunger satiated—but at the cost of your writing. You’ll lose the need, the urge, the push on the inside that propels writers to write. You’ll go silent.

The Muse is tricky. She made me choose, and I must have chosen, and then she drew a veil of amnesia over our encounter. I have no recollection of it happening. It’s just a fantasy, right? Some kind of metaphor? Things like that don’t happen? And yet I have at least one writing pal, a miserable fellow, unrooted in the world of others, not in great health, who publishes book after book. The Muse met up with him too around the same time. How did he choose?

All the same, I remain a citizen in the world of writing. Not one or two but a handful of poets have recently trusted me with their collections-in-progress, seeking comments and advice, and these projects have all been published. I’m also invited to supply blurbs for projects in the pipeline (and it’s a point of honor that I read the manuscript first). I oversaw the first go-round of Soundings East’s annual Claire Keyes poetry competition and am now coordinating White Mice: The International Lawrence Durrell Society Poetry Contest.

And I do still send off my work for publication, if in a modest way. Now and then I write op-eds for the opinion page of my town’s newspaper (circulation 7,200), but here it’s not the Muse pushing me into print but our nation’s sorry political state. Fingers to the keyboard, I’m doing what I can.