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In Kansas City for
one day, I have just read
to a group of young writers
at the arts high school.
They were not all dressed
in the same kind of robe,
as these are, nor did they
wander in the wooded
spaces of the hour,
looking for the day's
instructions. No one,
as yet, stares back at them
down centuries of thought,
wondering why this one
sits by herself or that one
looks sideways at her hand.
One of them asked how
I came to be a poet.
I told them what I know,
the worn story of wanting
what I heard once in a clutch
of words, words I knew
but could not understand.
I still don't understand
what good will come to the boy
who came in late in pants
that don't fit and a look
that looks so far across
his life he sees it
happening in a place
they haven't thought of yet.
I like to think that he
will be there in a corner
of some word, some image,
that no one understands,
writing the great poem
of daylight in Kansas
City, Kansas City
Transformation, one day
in the hard life of those
held prisoner by it.
His eyes are closed. He dreams
the centuries are gone,
are going, and the life
he knows, which is mine, too,
is coming to a kind
conclusion there, a clutch
of words crackling with breath
Roger Mitchell
"The poem itself might answer the question about
the purposes or value of poetry, but I would add
to it Wallace Stevens' famous under-stated adage:
Poetry 'helps people live their lives.' It's not
often that poetry is defended in such plain and
utilitarian terms."
Roger Mitchell, IU Bloomington
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