I was tempted to quote Rilke here: Who, if I cried out, would hear me ... but I didn’t want to unmask myself just yet. And probably the “conundrum” that asks for whom is a poem written haunts only my unsettled mind, so to speak. It’s certainly the relentless “angel” that’s been after me, out wrestling me for decades, causing my poems to careen from pole to pole to pole like a smacked rack of billiards. Truth be told, after all this time, it’s embarrassing.

Query: do I write for me, do I write for you, do I write for the Angelic Order? If I said “all of the above,” would that be too pat an answer? If I said that you were second runner up in the pageant and that I had yet to settle on a ranking for the other two (a lie), which you’d likely believe, would that be the over-and-out for you?

As for Rilke’s impassioned cry into the abyss (and perhaps mine, tbd), in contemporary American poetry, verbal modesty is the order of our day, as well a matching modesty of expressed feeling. And a healthy dollop of smarts is, as always, required. There’s much to recommend this tact sans the scourge of the irony-dodge. I have for my favorites the poets who are not seduced by the safety of irony, who are still taking serious risks, who sometimes break toward the embarrassment of the cry. (I’m sure by now you’ve guessed I’m an outlier, probably a cranky old guy whose poetry by today’s lights is given to the various excesses of the “past.” But let’s save that reveal for another time.)

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We’re alone (nothing new in that), but maybe more so in this disembodied digital/device age, with our hoard of photos, tweets, file folders of texts, which serve in place of …, with our often thin (threadbare?), frenetic, easy camaraderie via Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc., with the ubiquitous, intimacy-nulling, hyper-shared  “selfie.” So there’s comfort to be had in the recognizable, albeit flat, conversations of our published poems, us all more or less talking (firm voices) about the same or similar concerns and outrages, notwithstanding variations of race, ethnicity, gender, (age), etc., us all taking the same sort of measured chance, wanting not to turn each other away through some accidental trespass or faux pas. Wanting to belong to something that goes (mildly) against the digital grain. Feeling a comfort in the time a poem takes.

And why not! There’s a bit more meat on the poetry bones than on the digital bones. It’s a little less lonely in the poem-sphere. Besides, pretension is, all agree, to be condemned/eschewed at every turn. In art, it’s the lie, emptier in its way than the digital universe of our days. But to tell the truth, the low-key contemporary poem, the safety there… I feel let down so much of the time. And it escapes me why we are now so mild mannered. And the cry so misconstrued?

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Would you risk it, the grand gesture, run your chances, if somehow disturbed one day, you might in a poem of yours try catching the shadow of the angel? And in that gambit, to whom would you submit the immodest words you’d fashioned for pointing in the direction of the angel’s wake, which in the end would be failed words that you’d have to abandon (Valery)? Might you find yourself singing out loud a kind of hymn, in spite of yourself? And with what hope for the poem’s reception?  And always to be alone with your experience of that illuminating shadow. Maybe the terror of it, if you believe Rilke. Indeed, made more alone and at the same time less, knowing the reality of the intimation. The better part of wisdom and the fragility of reputation might have you stashing said failure among papers in the bottom desk drawer. And maybe that’s as it should be. There are appearances and vulnerabilities to manage. True friends to keep. And rightly so. Loneliness is an axe.

Alas, I’m far from that wise.