It’s a good trick if you can pull it off. As a poet you can’t be just game. You must also nip some gumption. Toss back some brass. “You must go on your nerve,” as Frank O’Hara half-in-jest requests from us. And you must be willing to take risks. Kiss-off a few relics. But enlist them as well. Remind yourself what really holds reign on those book shelves of yours. And always do the body’s bidding as much as the brain.

As a poet you hoist and raise up the mundane. Presto-ing the plain-spoken and preposterous—nickels and pickled eggs, pyres made out of matches and napkins, this phoenix to be snuffed out with a shot of whatever’s cheapest, and palming it all into keepsakes, minor-miracles. Or, something so lucid, so clued-in, it’s criminal.

But you can never do it alone. It calls for accomplices. Ones who are willing to be at-a-loss or bewildered. Even outwitted, taken-in. “At last between two persons,” there’s O’Hara again, “instead of two pages.” Without which the poem is a singular task. A past-act or worse, something passed-off, this transaction. And so it is here. In those gaps. That poetry matters again. Not only now. But just… then.

Mark DeCarteret
City Hall, April 2009