I blew away most of my youth writing bad poetry—long lugubrious lamentations about unbelonging in a crass uncaring commercial world of cutthroat competition that offended my delicate sensibilities—but when I hit 27 I became a grown-up, was married, had a kid, a car, a house with an address where bills were left on the Welcome mat, and I was forced to find my vocation in radio, working an early morning shift, where I learned that lugubriosity was of no earthly use to me. The audience was sleepy and not in need of narcissism. They were farmers, clerks, teachers, truckers, had work to do, and they needed something brisk to awaken them and arouse them to the prospects of the day. They needed cheering up.

My theme song was the Mills Brothers’ “Bugle Call Rag” and I spun Tex-Mex and klezmer, polkas and patriotic songs, doo-wop and bebop, jug bands and gospel quartets, tossing in a tap dancer here, a jaw harpist there, Bach, “Help Me, Rhonda,” Caruso, calypso, bel canto, singing belugas, blues guitarists, the Boswell Sisters, and now and then a poem. It started, I believe, when a man named Fred Petters from St. Cloud asked me to wish his wife a happy anniversary and I recited Shakespeare’s “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments” and I got a thank-you note from Rosemary, the wife, that suggested that children were sort of impediments but they were doing very well, thank you. So I started writing poems again, but not ones about alienation, bereavement, chaos, despair, existential fatalism, grinding hopelessness, impotence, etcetera, but jazzy ones like “My eyes get misty when I think of Julie Christie; if a man wished to be kissed he would want it to be her lips.” I had an audience, why not talk to them? I wrote rhymed metrical verse so it would grab their attention and I ventured outside standard poetic topics, love, beauty, natural wonder, blah blah blah, to outlying areas, sex, flatulence, urination, good manners, suicide, linguini, bikinis, bratwurst. I employed poetry to entertain the rank and file rather than try to impress fellow poets. It made me feel good about myself, a Sanctified Brethren boy slipping the bonds of sanctity to make people feel good.

I did radio for years and then suddenly, for no good reason, I was very old. I find that life quickens when there’s less in the tank, so you step lively, get to the point, wake up and die right. You’re too old to hold grudges or get in a fury about politics or imagine that maple syrup causes multiple sclerosis or that stepping on a crack can break your mother’s back. Past 65 it’s the age of gratitude, so seek out the beautiful, virtuous, loving, humorous, and true, and let the younger people obsess over the meaningless and the acquisition of nonsense and trash.

In 1994 I started up The Writer’s Almanac, which included a poem—Mary Oliver, Maxine Kumin, Theodore Roethke, Billy Collins, W.S. Merwin, Grace Paley, Louis Jenkins, etc., etc.—which I chose for its clarity—poems that could be grasped and enjoyed by a person whipping up an omelet with small children tugging at your pant legs— and because many stations broadcast TWA at 7 or 8 a.m., I excluded poems of dread, cynicism, agony, meditations on evil, poems about death, especially the death of small children. Too early in the morning for that. And over the years, as listeners wrote to tell me they looked forward to the daily poem, I felt I was performing a public service. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, for example, which details his miseries and regrets and then For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings that then I scorn to change my state with kings, a useful reminder in the morning while facing a difficult day: the redemptive power of love.

Back in college we never used the word “useful” when discussing The Waste Land or Berryman’s Dream Songs—we considered great art to live beyond such a mundane standard—and I pondered plenty of poetry that, I realized later, was written by poets who were falling-down drunk or batshit crazy and looking for the rat poison, and I’m sorry but you don’t go to the locked ward of the loony bin to figure out how to live your life.

In my twenties I stumbled along writing unreadable stuff and thinking of life as meaningless, which in my case was true at the time, and then I stumbled into radio and started enjoying talking to people, and, as it turned out, depression passed me by entirely, and now I could no more write about desperation than I could write about being an Alabama sharecropper locked in the Mobile jail for drunkenness and possession of a deadly weapon. I’ve never been to Mobile. I quit drinking long ago. My only deadly weapon was sarcasm.

I like the poem that you write as a gift to someone, such as:

This is a limerick for Jenny
Whose virtues are golden and many,
Whose faults are few,
Perhaps one or two,
Though right now I can’t think of any.

And if you’re ambitious, a poem, the first letters of whose lines spell out the recipient’s name:

Elegant, energetic, entertaining, and effusive,
Rarely repetitive and hardly ever tedious,
In every situation, she makes full use of
Comedy and command of all medias,
Always cool, she keeps turning the page,
Roving restlessly on the nightclub stage.
Happily at work while highly wary
Of jerks and opportunists, always very
Diligent in serving the sad and solitary,
Entertaining therapists with her private episodes,
Sail on, sweet soloist, Erica Rhodes.

I wrote poems for many of my doctors, including my cousin Dan who likely saved my life when he heard wheeziness listening to me tell the news from Lake Wobegon on the radio and shipped me to Mayo to get cut open and have my mitral valve sewn up. When someone saves your life, you don’t write a meditation on death. I wrote:

A diligent doctor named Dan
Is stuck with being the man
To urge compliance
With medical science
Which you won’t though you should and you can.

And recently, for Dr. John Chen:

My eye doctor, good Dr. Chen
Did magic recently when
He lasered one eye
Briefly, now I
Who couldn’t read signs
Or books or the Times
Can read them clearly again. And this, for me,
Who am literary
Makes Chen worth a poem with a pen.

I wrote my mournful poems when I was young and in good health but as I got into my sixties and had scary experiences such as seizures that sent me to a neurologist, I was forced to become an optimist.

There is a neurologist, Jim,
Whose diagnoses are grim— So he opens each visit
By asking, “How is it?”
And singing an uplifting hymn.
He gave me a pill for a start
That let me understand art.
One pill from the bottle,
Now I read Aristotle
And I think I am René Descartes.

In other words, Folks With Strokes Can Still Tell Jokes.

I departed from the poetry we studied in college, Auden, Berryman, Crane, Dickey, Eliot, et al., and toward rhymed metrical verse because rhyme is an aid to memory and I like to have poems in my head, and also meter creates an illusion of order within which loony gestures and inspirational asides have more impact.

I quit going to poetry readings long ago. Too much dramatic exhibition of keen sensitivity, too many obligatory sighs of wonderment. I much prefer laughter. Nobody fakes laughter. I give these to you in hopes that you might like some enough to read one aloud to a person sitting nearby. You just say, “Listen to this,” and read the poem and if it lands right, you’ve created a pleasant moment, and then we go on to something else.

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