Poetry Me-me-meme
Okay, I've been resisting this, waiting for just the right poem. And to hell with it, here's one that's just plain funny. I want to paint it on my mailbox. It's by Wendell Berry, from his collection A Part.

Throwing Away the Mail

Nothing is simple,
not even simplification.
Thus, throwing away
the mail, I exchange
the complexity of duty
for the simplicity of guilt.

I'm pretty much of an auto-didact when it comes to poetry. One morning, when I was in college, I walked into the University of Idaho Women's Center. There was this fine-boned, small woman on the couch, and there were these WORDS coming out of my mouth. I was just blown away. It was Olga Broumas, and she was doing poetry. Despite having gone to a lot of expensive private schools, somehow nobody managed to convey that poetry wasn't about words arranged funny on a page, poetry was about how it SOUNDED! And I was hooked. I inflicted bad poetry on the universe for a while and then the muse just dried up and went somewhere else, damn it. These days I write maybe one poem every year or so, and don't show them to a soul.

As far as reading poetry, I subscribe to the Big Fat Poetry Anthology theory of poetry, in which one keeps a BFPA close at hand. In the bathroom, say, or on my desk. I flip through it until I come to a poem I like, and if I really like several by that poet, I go out and buy a Big Fat Poetry collection by that author, and keep it handy for a while.

Among my faves are: Olga Broumas, e. e. cummings, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry and Emily Dickinson.