Choosing the Poetry of Life

What Is It You Are Really Here to Do?

There is a moment in everyone’s life when all the cards are on the table, all the chips, too — the moment of truth when the entire universe, it seems, is conspiring to call one’s attention to the choice we have every single day to let go of the past and move towards what is truly calling us, even if we have no idea where it will lead.

One such moment happened for me in 1969, during my first and only semester as a graduate student at Brown University’s prestigious MFA Creative Writing Program.

Like most long-haired, Vietnam-phobic seekers of truth whose depression-imprinted parents would have much preferred him to have chosen law, medicine or the Talmud over poetry, I found myself, at the ripe old age of 22, sleeping 12 hours a day, posting my newly minted poems on trees at midnight, and feverishly reading Rilke, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams just in case the conversation turned in that direction with any number of my far more well-read poetry professors engaging me in esoteric literary conversations at any number of ultra hip faculty parties I kept getting invited to — the kind of heady gatherings where Kurt Vonnegut and other traveling bards kept showing up, laugh lines around their eyes unable to mask a lifetime’s worth of sadness and despair.