How does one come to poetry? I suppose each of us arrives at it differently. Myself, I was born and raised on an Iowa farm. We were taught Longfellow in grade school ("Snow-Bound"), and an Iowa blizzard urged me to write my own, which fortunately has been last.

There was a kind of loneliness in the rural existence I experienced, in spite of my having loving parents and eight siblings. The long light of sunset always called me, as I did hog chores west of the grove beyond the farm house. Always, there was something beyond. I say "lonely" because there were none around me back then who were interested in language the way I was. I think my parents knew I would be a writer before I did. When I went away to minor seminary for high school (thinking I might be called the the priesthood), an English teacher there, Colin Kahl, fortunately was very supportive of this wanna-be poet. He had been, or was, a poet himself.

In college I encountered Robert Bly and realized early on that if I read much of his poetry I would likely never develop a voice of my own, so I avoided his work for some fifty years. I was 20 when I first heard him reading and chanting and doing his magic and the experience was overpowering. That is what I wanted my poetry to do, but I had to withdraw from him, remove myself from the sound of that voice. so I could find my own. (Many years later I came back to Bly and recognized that he sounded more like a Norwegian bachelor farmer than the shaman who had overpowered me.)

I was mostly a self-taught poet -- that is, I didn't have the luxury of setting aside some years to study poetry and get an MFA degree as many other poets have done. I did take one creative writing class in college, with Morgan Gibson at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who taught me to condense, condense, condense. And I did do an independent study poetry project with Sister Therese Lentfoehr to cobble together, finally, my college degree. In both cases I was still a young and fumbling poet and appreciated their guidance, but more their support; it was as if they were saying, yes, this Iowa farm boy could be a poet.

I was fortunate, living in Milwaukee in the early 1970s, to be friended by poets Karl Young and Martin J. Rosenblum, who introduced me to the world of poetry beyond the old, dead white guys I'd studied in literature class. I like to say Willliam Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley were my mentors and taught me more about poetry than anyone else. Anyone other than my father, that is, who perhaps taught me the most.

My father was a tight-lipped Iowa farmer, his words well-chewed. When he did speak, others listened to him. I tell the story of the time he and I were atop our ladders, painting the barn. The tax assessor was there on the ground below us to see how much the improvement might add to our tax bill. Trying to make conversation, he asked my father: "Do you think it'll rain?" My dad said, "It'll be a hell of a long dry spell if it don't."

To me, that's what poetry is, that kind of speech, the tightness of it, the brook no nonsense push of it. That's what I wanted my poetry to do. The "no ideas but in things" of William Carlos Williams. The joy of Gerard Manley Hopkins' language. The straight ahead speech of my father, of the Imagists, the Japanese haiku poets, the old Chinese masters. Letting the things of the world speak for themselves, as Lorine Niedecker did. I wanted the common idiom that one overhears in diners, in taverns. I wanted a literature which comes out of our lives.

Here I am, 76 years old now, with a lot of poems behind me -- my two books of "selected poems," Middle Ground and In This Place total 567 pages, with a couple of new books beyond them. Am I satisfied that the various influences which washed over me have fostered the kind of poetry I was meant to write. Indeed, I am.

At this stage, when I think about what poetry is, these are some pieces of it:

		The hogs out in the west field,
		the dust of the day settling,
		the low sun.

		The rise of the road
		where the world ended,
		and where it began.

		The longing.

		Church sounds.

		The radio, Hank Williams.

		Hearing my father speak,
		my mother speaking with him.

		Listening in diners.

		Listening in forests.

		Plain words, small
		and earthy.

		The sound of water.
		The taste of it, cold.

		An old man on a mountain.
		The mountain.

		A place to stand between
		mystery and clarity.

		Poetry is
		what the mountain is
		when you can't see it
		in the distance.

		Not so much about the poems themselves
		but about the seeing that poetry requires.

		Shakespeare's severity,
		the joy of Hopkins' line.

		The red wheelbarrow
		upon which so much
		still depends and
		those plums --
		O, those plums!

		Light gone
		from the eye of the sparrow
		under the fir, dead in winter.

		Old pines in moonlight.

		Those blue eyes that married me.

		I remember the pig feeders
		banging at night,
		all night.
		That's poetry.

		Somebody always pounding
		a log or a bucket or a tub.

		My father talking, that was poetry.
		He never said "Chew your words well,
		son," but that is what I heard.

		Poetry is
		where the wind is going
		when it is daylight
		but the sun has yet to show.

		It is when what is lit
		has not yet exploded.

		The silence in the evening,
		except for the crickets.