Writer Charles Behlen told me that reading a poem could be like stepping off a plane into Madagascar when you thought your destination was Lubbock, Texas. Things would look different, he said. I took it as his way of chiding me for a cheeky chirp about his phraseology in a poem.

How did Behlen’s airy simile make me feel? Treated as if a clueless upstart. Infantilized. Mad as hell. When I mentioned I’d been reading Louise Glück’s collected work, Behlen returned the following (we were corresponding) about her effect on him: “I need more dirt on my potato.”

Notwithstanding the thin skin I bare above, I’ve kept Behlen’s remonstrance, along with his dirty potato, in my pipe for smoking along the way as I stutter-step my way through current verse. The quest is to do something directly with it — what verb do I want: Experience? Confront? Process? Interpret?

Oh God! Is this a kind of readerly populism that implies I’ve had enough of experts? That I want to meet the product head-on without the mediation of a poetry clergy? That I want to wallow in being a truculent (protestant?) outsider bent on getting to grips with “difficult” texts, going mano a mano with the word of dodgy deities?

Could be.

The most a haiku has fulfilled me is this one ending Ocean Vuong’s “Immigrant Haibun”:

Summer in the mind.
God opens his other eye:
two moons in the lake.
(from Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Copper Canyon Press, 2016)

Why? I feel bare and clueless in saying it, but: it’s because eyes are orbs, like the moon; two moons reflected in the lake seem fluky but possible in the physical world, and it seems more accomplished to make poetry from the plausible than from the fantastical. Also, who has two eyes? We do! I like the conceit of an ocular God with double peepers; support is lent to the intuition that man created God in man’s image, but also, since other creatures have two eyes as well, to the conclusion that God might just as soon look like a possum or a woman.

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