Sunday, April 16, 2006; BW08

This year marks the 10th anniversary of Poet's Choice on our pages. The column was hatched, appropriately we think, at a family birthday party in September of 1995. My sister was celebrating a round, stately number of years, and her colleagues -- English professors at Howard University -- had gathered in my house to raise a glass. One professor, Alinda Sumers, approached me and suggested that Book World feature a column by the current Poet Laureate. I was flabbergasted. Why hadn't we thought of that ourselves? We invited Robert Hass to lunch and the rest, as they say, is poetry.

Book World is very proud to publish this ongoing tribute to verse and versifiers; the column is simply unparalleled in any other American newspaper. Over the years, it has featured ancient as well as contemporary masters, the famous and the virtually unknown, the homegrown and the foreign, and it has seen republication in two books by the same name. This coming Thursday, we'll celebrate the 10th anniversary in a special event here at The Washington Post. To honor the distinguished writers who have hosted Poet's Choice, three of whom are former U.S. Poet Laureates, we offer here a bouquet of excerpts -- a representative smattering of writing by them and about them in Book World through the years.

-- The Editor

From Robert Hass's inaugural column:

So, I was sitting in my new office in the attic of the Jefferson Library, watching the October sun through a handsome open window glisten on the Capitol dome and wondering what a poet laureate could usefully do.

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there --

William Carlos Williams wrote. These are lines that poets know. They help us to remember that what we do matters, especially when we are feeling that the world has not fathomed its importance. But on this particular morning, I remembered that Williams had spent his professional life practicing family medicine in Rutherford, N.J. His lines were a prescription. What I needed to do was apply Dr. Williams's dose to the body politic. In a form, of course -- this is a free country -- in which people could take it or leave it.

Poetry appeared in newspapers almost as soon as the newspapers themselves appeared in the young American republic. There are famous instances. Our national anthem saw the dawn light as a poem entitled "The Defence of Fort McHenry," published in the Baltimore American in September of 1814, and Clement Moore, a professor of Hebrew at the Columbia Theological Union, wandered from his scholarly chores to publish "A Visit from St. Nicholas" -- the one American poem, I've read, that almost everyone can recite a little of -- in the Troy Sentinel on the night before Christmas in 1823. Abraham Lincoln first saw print as a poet in a newspaper, and the few poems Emily Dickinson published in her lifetime appeared in the Springfield Register, touched up by the editor for popular consumption, and Henry David Thoreau wrote aphoristic couplets for a country paper. Toward the end of the century another widely loved American poem, Ernest Lawrence Thayer's "Casey at the Bat," was printed in the new paper of his college classmate William Randolph Hearst, the San Francisco Examiner.

This chorus of voices -- "so many uttering tongues," Walt Whitman wrote -- gave a shared language to American readers all through the 19th century. And in Whitman himself, a newspaperman from his teens, there is an attitude toward reading and toward poetry that is hard even to imagine in the last years of the 20th century.

For many years, Robert Hass has buoyed our spirits with a weekly tonic of poetry: Syndicated in newspapers across the country, "Poet's Choice" has become a national respite. I have met lawyers, tennis players and cashiers who read "Poet's Choice" and ask my opinion on the poems selected. Just recently a woman in my ballroom dance class stopped in the middle of a syncopated waltz turn to say how much she enjoyed opening The Washington Post Book World each Sunday for her "little surprise," like biting into a chocolate without knowing which delicious filling -- raspberry cream, nougat, coconut? -- she'd discover.

Of course, the catch-22 of writing such a column is that we have never been treated to a poem by Robert Hass. A pity, because his is a distinguished literary career: In addition to publishing four volumes of his own poems, he has been an essayist ( Twentieth Century Pleasures ) as well as an editor (of poetry collections by the late Californian Robinson Jeffers and the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer, and of the charming "wedding anthology" Into the Garden ). We've been treated to selections from his recent haiku translations ( The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson and Issa ); as the primary translator of Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz, he continues to perform a incalculable service to world literature.

High time to rectify this omission. To bookend the conclusion of the old year and the flowering of the new, here's a sampling of Robert Hass's poetry. . . . the beginning to his marvelous poem-within-a-poem, "January" ( Human Wishes , Ecco):

Three clear days
and then a sudden storm --
the waxwings, having
feasted on the pyracantha,
perch in the yard
on an upended pine, and face
into the slanting rain.
I think they are a little drunk.

"I was making this gathering," Hass adds, "which pleased me, the waxwings that always pass through at this time of year, the discarded Christmas tree they perched in, and the first January storm, as if I had finally defined a California season -- when Rachel came down the walk and went into the house. I typed out the poem -- the birds giddy with Janus, the two-faced god -- and then went in to say hello."

When Rita Dove was a young poet living in Europe, she wrote several poems about women saints. They are to be found in her second book, Museum (Carnegie-Mellon Univ.). I thought of them when I read a poem from her most recent book, On the Bus With Rosa Parks (Norton).

Rosa

Now she sat there,
the time right inside a place
so wrong it was ready.

That trim name with
its dream of a bench
to rest on. Her sensible coat.

Doing nothing was the doing:
the clean flame of her gaze
carved by a camera flash.

How she stood up
when they bent down to retrieve
her purse. That courtesy.

This stunning small poem does so much to capture the spirit of the time and of great-souled Rosa Parks in a few words. It made me think how much Rita Dove's poems are about the right to a vivid inner life. One of her most moving poems on this subject comes from her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Thomas and Beulah (Carnegie-Mellon Univ.), a sequence of narrative poems about an ordinary and remarkable African-American family. Beulah, in this poem, is neither saint nor activist, but a woman in a life full of the demands of nurturing, trying to hold onto some corner of herself that belongs to her.

Daystar

She wanted a little room for thinking:
but she saw diapers steaming on the line,
a doll slumped behind the door.

So she lugged a chair behind the garage
to sit out the children's naps.

Sometimes there were things to watch --
the pinched armor of a vanished cricket,
a floating maple leaf. Other days
she stared until she was assured
when she closed her eyes
she'd see only her own vivid blood.

She had an hour, at best, before Liza appeared
pouting from the top of the stairs.
And just what was mother doing
out back with the field mice? Why,

building a palace. Later
that night when Thomas rolled over and
lurched into her, she would open her eyes
and think of the place that was hers
for an hour -- where
she was nothing,
pure nothing, in the middle of the day.

Poetry connects us to what is deepest in ourselves. It gives us access to our own feelings, which are often shadowy, and engages us in the art of making meaning. It widens the space of our inner lives. It is a magical, mysterious, inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language. It is "a revelation of words by means of the words" (Wallace Stevens), a form of "stored magic" (Robert Graves), "a room of marvels" (André Breton). It has a strong kinship to prayer. I consider it a verbal transaction, a bodily art form that opens up our spiritual selves.

It is a great privilege for me to take up Book World's Poet's Choice column, which was so insightfully inaugurated and shaped by Robert Hass over many years, and so handsomely carried forward by Rita Dove. They have set a light tone and a high standard, which I hope to emulate in the weeks and months to come. As a writer and an avid reader -- all writers are readers who have spilled over -- I have been inspired by many poems over the years and I am eager to share these poems with others. My idea is to introduce and present a broad spectrum of poets and poems from America and around the world.

Poetry is an ancient and international activity -- it precedes prose in all literatures, and there has never been a culture without it. This suggests how deeply we need the knowledge -- the wisdom -- that poetry carries in its body.

Air an instrument of the tongue.
The tongue an instrument
Of the body. The body
An instrument of spirit,
The spirit a being of the air.

-- Robert Pinsky, from "Song"

This is my next-to-last Poet's Choice column. It's time for me to move on. My regret at leaving the column is tempered by my delight that it will be taken over by Robert Pinsky, one of our very finest poet-critics, whose work I've been reading avidly for 30 years. I was lucky to start out with his first book, Sadness and Happiness (1975), which brought to contemporary poetry a rich discursiveness, a compelling new way of thinking and a refreshing sense of other people. I've followed him through his book-length poem An Explanation of America (1980), a remarkable meditation on being a citizen in our republic; History of My Heart (1984), which shows him to be an omnivorous thinker working at full power; The Want Bone (1990), which initiated a strange new lyricism into his work; The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poem s : 1966-1996 (1996), an essential gathering that included 21 new poems; and, most recently, Jersey Rain (2000), a work of mid-life reckonings. "Now near the end of the middle stretch of road/What have I learned?" he asks in the title poem. "Some earthly wiles. An art."

By now everyone should know that in 1997 Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project during his tenure as poet laureate of the United States (1997-2000). This project, a huge national resource, has culminated in three anthologies, which he has edited with Maggie Dietz: Americans' Favorite Poems ; Poems to Read ; and, most recently, An Invitation to Poetry: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology , which includes a DVD of people from all walks of life saying something about their favorite poems and then reading them aloud. The original meaning of the word "anthology," which derives from the Greek, is "a bouquet of flowers," and these books compose a surprisingly diverse and colorful garden. They give us a strong sense of how single poems reach individual readers.

Here is one of my favorite poems by Pinsky. I once had the life-changing experience of teaching poetry to a group of deaf children, and thus this poem has special relevance to me:

If You Could Write One Great Poem, What Would You Want It To Be About?

(Asked of four student poets at the Illinois Schools for the Deaf and Visually Impaired)

Fire: because it is quick, and can destroy.
Music: place where anger has its place.
Romantic Love -- the cold or stupid ask why.
Sign: that it is a language, full of grace,

That it is visible, invisible, dark and clear,
That it is loud and noiseless and is contained
Inside a body and explodes in air
Out of a body to conquer from the mind.

Edward Hirsch's justly celebrated poem "Fast Break" (from his book Wild Gratitude , Knopf) captures and epitomizes the speed and brilliance of an inspired moment when things go right -- in the rhythms of a sport or in the charmed exertions of sentences and lines.

Hirsch's single long sentence courses sure-footedly to its ultimate goal: the noun "net." The movement through the couplets, unfettered and purposeful, demonstrates what it describes: the grace of improvisation working through a plan. The elegiac dedication in the subtitle emphasizes charges of mortality in certain phrases -- above all in the past tense of "loved."

Fast Break

In Memory of Dennis Turner, 1946-1984

A hook shot kisses the rim and
hangs there, helplessly, but doesn't drop,

and for once our gangly starting center
boxes out his man and times his jump

perfectly, gathering the orange leather
from the air like a cherished possession

and spinning around to throw a strike
to the outlet who is already shoveling

an underhand pass toward the other guard
scissoring past a flat-footed defender

who looks stunned and nailed to the floor
in the wrong direction, trying to catch sight

of a high, gliding dribble and a man
letting the play develop in front of him

in slow motion, almost exactly
like a coach's drawing on the blackboard,

both forwards racing down the court
the way that forwards should, fanning out

and filling the lanes in tandem, moving
together as brothers passing the ball

between them without a dribble, without
a single bounce hitting the hardwood

until the guard finally lunges out
and commits to the wrong man

while the power-forward explodes past them
in a fury, taking the ball into the air

by himself now and laying it gently
against the glass for a lay-up,

but losing his balance in the process,
inexplicably falling, hitting the floor

with a wild, headlong motion
for the game he loved like a country

and swiveling back to see an orange blur
floating perfectly through the net.