A poem is an urgent communication, like a sob, belly-laugh, sigh. A worthwhile poem exists not to amuse, delight, divert, but because it must, a spasm of the soul. Its substance, sound, appearance on the page are delivery mechanisms. We may count syllables but without urgency the syllables don’t count.

The same might be said of any expressive art: that it somehow has to be. My focus here is poems.

I don’t remember urgency being discussed in classrooms. We discussed technique as if a poem were a machine. How did a sonnet differ from an ode? Alexandrine versus pentameter, blank verse versus rhymed. We need grammar, syntax, and vocabulary to speak but they are not our reason for speaking. I speak to be with you, mingle minds, intertwine, because I get lonely alone. Sometimes my impulse is casual, convivial, at other times compulsory. Prose, being reasonable, invites conversation. Poetry, like music or the visual arts, needn’t explain itself.

Most poems fail. Either words crack under the strain, the urgency is insufficient, or both. Poems are often made for the wrong reason: to amuse, impress, perplex. Many people want to be poets, Lord knows why. Urgency hurts – making a worthwhile poem is impossible – who wants that!

The poems I love stab. Their maker’s need slices through space and time. We feel their urgency even if we can’t explain it. Shakespeare weeps on my shoulder, soaking my shirt. I can almost smell him.

Poems that don’t lacerate I’ve no use for, however adroit. Phony tears repel.

I often return to Robert Frost’s “The Pasture” to rekindle this confusion. How to explain this tiny poem’s improbable power?

Plenty of poems pack a punch but somehow this became my ur-poem.

Its clarity staggers. It takes eight words – ten syllables – to acquaint us with its speaker so vividly he’s in the room with us. He’s a boy, but not a tot, old enough to hanker for companionship, a farm boy with his regular chores, which may not seem like much, but mean a lot to him. He’s going to clean the spring and fetch the calf – what could be more mundane! – yet somehow the awful mystery of being glows through these two vignettes. Together versus alone, clogged versus clean, a mother’s love both unbalancing (her calf totters) and consoling, and in that reiterated plea – “You come too” – every soul’s aching need for love. We smile through our tears this moment is so happy-sad, unexceptional and ethereal. Every syllable contributes to this effect. We know the poet had to compose this poem, had to, from his howling depths.

This way of reading poems isn’t taught because it’s speculative, as vague as ecstasy or prayer. The classroom seeks to shrink wonder to communicable lessons, as cannibals shrink their enemies’ skulls. I’d hate to defend the foregoing paragraphs before academic peers, though I’m sure they’re true. Reading poems no less than writing them is an imaginative attempt, a spiritual experience impossible to explain. I read for intimacy. Through words on a page I feel speakers straining, reaching for my fingers not to drown. Our affectionate attention can haul them from oblivion and give them life. What a gift.