I’ve been thinking about poems.

A futile, even frivolous concentration in a collapsing world, one might say. I almost agree. Few read poems today beyond those who make them their business. Poems do not resonate in our public discourse. A vast majority of our leaders, I’ll wager, haven’t read a poem since school, when they had to. Oughtn’t I be using my words to man the barricades in this war to save civilization or at least to condole its casualties? Isn’t poetry a peacetime privilege, a pretty way to occupy an idle hour?

Poetry, surely, is not the language of crisis. You need silence and tranquility to hear a poem. Poems presume a companionable audience of earnest listeners. Isn’t talk about poems as culpable as Nero fiddling while Rome burned? (He didn’t, by the way. He was many miles distant at the time.)

I’d shout and growl if such rough noise might assist in decency’s defense. Much of what I’ve published during the past decade has been rants or calls to arms. I feigned more optimism than I felt. After November Fifth of last year, I gave up. My gloom was more than I could bear. To save myself from breaking, I had to look away. My frantic gaze settled on poetry, my first love.

From age sixteen (fifty-three years ago!) to about age twenty-five, I dreamed of poetry as my vocation. Prose I’d produce for a paycheck, to subsidize my poetic habit. My aim was not a career as a poet – all but a few poetry-makers have had to do something else to pay the rent – but to spend my time tumbling with musical syllables. Reading and writing poems are, for me, the same activity, immersion in the mystery of why words sing.

As family and career required more time, I spent less on poems. Also, it disheartened having no one to read poems with. It amazes me how Emily Dickinson kept at it for so long, tossing thousands of poems unread into a trunk. Amherst, Mass., circa 1860 and Bedford, New York circa 1980 were not dissimilar milieus: prosperous, industrious, proper, and indifferent to poems, which disrupt complacencies. I ended up – pathetically – reading my poems to daughter Becca, age seven, who, smart as she is, couldn’t have fathomed my attempts though she vividly remembers the emotion of the moment.

Why was I composing poems for no hearers? Why was Emily? To settle an internal tumult, I’m guessing, to harmonize ache into art. Poetry acted on me as a sort of narcotic, transmuting misery to music, turning my frown upside down. Why this should be I will never know.

Today, while almost giddily happy in my personal circumstances, I am wretched about the condition of mankind. My pessimism may prove unjustified – let’s hope – but I cannot reason myself out of the conviction that America and humanity are sliding nowhere good. I must look away from the news to preserve my sanity. Our first obligation is to save ourselves.

I share my poetical enthusiasm warily, aware it’s unlikely to be yours. I dread your dismissing me as a trifler – or a fiddling Nero. That I don’t howl about headlines does not mean I don’t read them, only that I must look elsewhere for my joy. In poetry, as in all arts, we encounter our species at its noblest, striving to bring order to chaos, loveliness to loathsomeness, hope to despair. The inarticulate assumption of any poem is that man is capable of better, even of goodness. It soothes me to imagine our species worth salvaging, though I don’t believe it.