I’ve been reading lots of poems to find some to share. This is plain flat-out fun. Poetry has been my Cleopatra since I was sixteen, but I quit reading much when nobody else I knew did. Poets don’t hang out in offices or country clubs. Walt Whitman deplores sales meetings and PowerPoints. Business and conventional conviviality are antitheses of the poetic impulse, which is lonesome, slashing, true. Maybe a little doggerel for holidays or anniversaries to spice the intolerable predictable, but beyond that?

It’s dreary reading what no one else does. I keep thinking of Emily Dickinson, George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins scribbling alone, door shut, never the faintest hope their housemates would understand what they were up to. Any writer writes in private – but most of us with the hope of one day sharing with sympathizers. Composing is lovemaking by other means. But unless you’ve got incredible nerve (as the three aforementioned scribblers did) making love to a ghost loses its zest. I never quit writing poems, because I had no choice, but I mostly quit reading them – why bother? – it was too sad.

Then you came along. I chanced a little piece about a mostly forgotten poet, Ernest Dowson, and wow, thousands and thousands of “clicks”! I tried another – about a haunting villanelle by a more recent wizard, Elizabeth Bishop, familiar to poetry-lovers but hardly a household name. Bingo again. How about doing this regularly? Bingo, bingo. Would once a week be too frequent as pleasant getaways from the noxious Nameless One? Seems not. This opened a yawning maw, hungry for the right sort of poem to share.

A few ground-rules. The poem had to be:

· Short. We could trespass our self-imposed six-hundred-word limit by a paragraph or two, but neither of us has all day. Sorry, Paradise Lost or (more regretfully) Four Quartets.

· Accessible. Some haunting brief poems are fiendishly difficult to decode. If you have to reread a poem a dozen times to derive its sense, it’s not a short poem anymore.

· Not too accessible. Brains, like palates, seek some resistance to chew, not just yogurt.

· Relevant (a poor overworked adjective but handy here). What we shmooze about must suit our historical moment, “say something” worth the hearing. Many poems, thrilling to first readers, lose their fizz when actors are forgotten. (I include Pope’s Dunciad in that category, alas.)

· Fun. God save me from boring you. Shoot me first.

· A conversational springboard. This is not a seminar on literature and I’m no professor. Neither are these missives “about” poetry. They’re about a couple of pals strolling, struggling to navigate our way through this hellish moment. If poetry is only for poetry-lovers it has lost its purpose.

· Varied – in topic, tempo, epoch, music, maker, you name it. Conversation, like lettuce, is better fresh.

No surprise, I’ve made lists – and lists – into which I dip my pen like a fishhook into a stocked pond to see what nibbles. A conversational topic must interest both speaker and hearer to ignite. Today’s is a nasty little job, which requires neither introduction nor intervention to explicate its effect.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) was ever an interesting, intelligent, and inventive poet, critics and anthologists concur. His best have passed the first round of posterity’s cruel cuts. These three crisp quatrains are not his best, you may hate them, but they sure do pack a punch. They stick to the brain like pine pitch. Ask yourself as you read, What’s going on here? Is this satire? Vitriol? A nursery jingle for depressives? Every time I read this, I wish I hadn’t, then I read it again. Buckle up.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThis Be the Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf.Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.