What struck me most about the birthday party I attended July 29 was not the gifts – a Bartlett pear tree, a proclamation from the governor – or the fact that the guest of honor was not there (he was resting at his summer home in Provincetown). No, what stood out about this celebration, in honor of poet Stanley Kunitz’s centennial year, was what happened once the cake was cut.

Yes, the dedication ceremony on the grounds of the Tower Hill Botanic Garden in Boylston, Mass., was lovely. The leaves of the pear tree swayed in the breeze as the president of the Worcester County Botanical Society talked about Kunitz’s boyhood in the city of Worcester. He described the poet’s two forms of cultivation – gardening and writing – and the early losses Kunitz suffered. (His father committed suicide before he was born, and the stepfather he adored died unexpectedly.) As the president noted, Kunitz had “turned a sand dune into an oasis,” and not just at his home in Provincetown, Mass.

Then Debra Kang Dean, an accomplished poet in her own right, read Kunitz’s famous poem, “My Mother’s Pears.” The last stanza, as you may know, ends with “Make room/for the roots!‘’ my mother cries,/ “Dig the hole deeper.” In many ways, that’s what Kunitz has done all his life. Making room for both poems and younger poets.

After she’d finished reading, Ms. Kang Dean noted that,“A poet’s words travel. Poems become kind of a body, or an essense that we give body to with our voices.”

Once we’d moved inside for cake, it was easy to see how everyone at that celebration became part of a larger body. The room was full of people who wouldn’t normally spend time with one another: Young men with long ponytails and white-haired women in their bold red hats. Writers from the Worcester County Poetry Association – which co-sponsored the event – and children too young to hold a pencil. Poets who had studied with Kunitz, and people who knew only that he was a first-rate gardener.

But as each person took a slice of the cake – decorated to look like an open book – he or she offered a tribute to Kunitz, or a related story. One woman talked about a teacher of hers, who had studied with the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet years ago. He would read her work with a red pen in hand, and then draw a line through the last stanza. “The poem ends up here,” he would tell her. He expected excellence, but his approach was calm and evenhanded.

Imagine if everyone in the poetry world behaved the same way, rather than giving the kind of “swashbuckling” critiques and reviews so popular today. Does anything thrive when it’s  attacked with a machete?

But things do flourish, as one man explained, under the right circumstances. The anecdote he shared was of Kunitz two years ago, when, at 98, he seemed to be on his deathbed. Several of his closest friends had gathered around him, to say goodbye. Kunitz began talking about his garden, however, and the more he talked, the more he seemed to perk up. “Contact with soil and plants can be revivifying,” the man concluded.

The story I told was of watching Kunitz 10 years ago, when the New England Poetry Club had a cake in honor of his 90th birthday. He bent down to inspect the confection, a look of quiet satisfaction on his face. Then he picked up a knife and carefully cut around the 90 in the icing. He put that piece aside for himself, and then began slicing for others. It seemed so typical of the mentoring he had done over the years, as a founder of the Poets House in New York City and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He had nurtured poets at the college level and as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

The last comment I heard, as I was leaving the party, was from the president of the Botanical Society, who was showing people pictures of Kunitz’s yard. “We need to see the poet in his garden, or the creator in his Eden,” he said.

In many ways, we already had.

The handsome young man handed me a bottle of Ting, Jamaica’s popular grapefruit soda, and said with a mischievous smile, “This is where Stella got her groove back.”

Oh really. Well, my groove is fine, thank you.

I had flown to the island on assignment. My task: Write a travel story about the Calabash Literary Festival for my editor. I also hoped to write a poem for myself, since I’d be in the land of sun and sand, where the ocean looks like a thousand green gems, each a slightly different hue.

But poetry can be elusive. It tends to hide if you seek it.

“Yeah, man” quickly became “no, ma'am,” despite the striking things I saw – the rugged coast, the threadbare chickens walking along the edge of the highway, the stubborn little donkey standing in the middle of the road, as if it owned the whole country.

The problem, I realized, was that I was overloaded with imagery, and images without context or meaning are worthless. A poem results from a sudden “awakening of attention,” as W.S. Merwin says in the latest issue of Poets & Writers.

Part of what I needed had come, oddly enough, my first day there, when Jake’s (the resort that hosts Calabash) hired a boat to take some of the featured writers down the coast, to the Pelican Bar, and then up the Black River. I was invited to go along.

The boat could definitely rock and roll – especially if two people tried to board at once. There were no cushions and no cover. Amina Baraka, wife of the poet Amiri, wasn’t sure she wanted to get in.

But she did, and she and Amiri sat toward the back of the boat. I shared the last bench with novelist Colin Channer, one of the festival’s founders.

Colin is a warm, welcoming man, with a big voice and an easy laugh. As we rode along past resorts and then open stretches of beach, he chuckled each time Amina squealed about a large wave. The grin on his face never seemed to fade as he looked at the people in the boat – including novelist Russell Banks and poet Roger Bonair-Agard – or toward the island and then the open water.

His look was so serene and appreciative, I finally had to ask: “What are you thinking about?”

He looked out toward the waves and said, “I’m thinking about the 50 things I need to do when I get back.” The festival would begin that night.

And then he added, in a softer voice, “I’m also thinking about the rhythm of those hills,” he said, pointing. “They’re so musical.”

Wow.

A few minutes later he pointed toward the hills again, saying they looked “like a trumpet solo.”

I tried looking at things as intently as Colin did. The Pelican Bar, our first destination, was a hut on stilts, on a sandbar half a mile offshore. The “stairs” were made of tree limbs. And the “bar” consisted of a cooler full of bottled drinks, including Ting, my new favorite.

I tried to take in every detail, admiring the crafts that a man named Joseph had for sale on the floor of the hut. He’d painted shells and carved bird houses from gourds. But I didn’t notice as much as Colin did.

When we got back into the boat, he said, “Look in your pocket.”

In my pocket? Why?

I searched my jacket twice before I found the piece of coral Joseph had slipped in as a gift.

As we headed to the Black River, several miles away, I asked Colin if he was surprised that the festival, now in its fifth year, had become so successful, drawing people from all around Jamaica and the world.

No, he said, people “needed it, they just didn’t know they did.”

Talk about foresight – or faith. Whatever you call it, the man clearly has vision, which is very different from sight. One is the ability to notice details, the other to understand them. When they come together, a poem (or a novel) sings.

What I didn’t realize until later, though, is that Colin was nearly blind until a few years ago. He credits skilled surgeons for restoring what little sight he has.

That unlikely juxtaposition was exactly the kind of inspiration I’d been hoping to find.

It’s June. Have you recovered from National Poetry Month yet?

I ask that partially in jest, considering that many poets give more readings and workshops in April than in the other 11 months combined. But if you were pooped by April 30, think how the staff of the Academy of American Poets must have felt.

After all, they’re the ones who make National Poetry Month (NPM) happen. That’s a bit like throwing a Mardi Gras party for the entire nation. 

What few people realize, though, is that the academy has only nine full-time employees and an annual budget of just $1.7 million, with $400,000 earmarked for prizes.

So how does the academy manage to pull off the impossible? And where did the idea for NPM come from?

The latter is easier to answer. In 1995, Maggie Richards, a marketer at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, came up with the NPM concept, and an editor at FSG urged the academy to adopt the project. They did, and after brainstorming with other literary organizations, educators, booksellers, and publishers, the academy launched Poetry Month in 1996 with readings in New York and nine other cities.

Word spread quickly, and the following spring more literary groups joined in. The media also increased their coverage.

“National Poetry Month has been so wildly successful because of the vast number of individuals and organizations that instantly took the program to heart and created local celebrations everywhere in America,” says Tree Swenson, executive director of the academy.

That willingness to share the glory says a lot about the academy, but convincing fellow writers is easier than winning over the public. The latter could only be achieved with creativity and a lot of legwork. 

The launch of the academy’s website (Poets.org) in 1997 generated a huge amount of interest. But no one could have predicted that by its 10th anniversary, NPM would have changed the cultural landscape. Poetry is now celebrated – for one month anyway – in schools, bookstores, libraries, and cultural centers. Poetry appears on posters and billboards, on radio, TV, and in thousands of newspapers. It seems to be everywhere.

Again, what’s the academy’s secret?

According to Charles Flowers, associate director, the staff helps people reconnect – or connect for the first time – with the art form in a positive way. “We help people tap into something that is already there,” he says. “People are already excited about poetry, and we are the catalyst; it’s there just waiting to happen.”

Poetry may indeed be “waiting to happen,” but the academy helps that along in some imaginative ways.

One year it gave out poetry books on April 15 at the post office at 8th Avenue and 33rd Street In New York. Another year it asked people to vote on which poet should be the subject of a US stamp (Langston Hughes won). Every event seems to send the message that poetry is – or could be – a natural part of daily life.

The academy’s vast and newly designed website, which drew 570,000 unique visitors this past April, conveys that same idea. And the site – with the most varied and extensive poetry coverage online – will keep many of those people coming back all year for the audio, the bios of poets, the prose features, resources for teachers, and more.

But it isn’t just the content that draws people; it’s the attitude as well. The site, like NPM events, has a “you are welcome here” feel. The academy seems to be sharing what it loves, not handing down decrees from on high.

That, in this poet-journalist’s opinion, is what really attracts crowds.

Attitude alone, however, isn’t enough to make NPM a reality. There’s also a tremendous amount of work involved. Just ask Mr. Flowers, who calls April his “grumpy time” and asks co-workers to bear with him.

As coordinator of the NPM campaign, Flowers must answer phone and e-mail requests from people around the country, deal with the media, host readings and introduce poets at events, oversee NPM updates to the academy’s website, and send out thousands of posters.

Does he get any sleep in April?

Flowers laughs, acknowledging that the phones never stop ringing. He also admits that the close-knit staff sometimes feel like “Little League players swinging at everything thrown our way.”

That’s not the impression observers have. Flowers always sounds upbeat and energetic on the phone. But if you comment on his demeanor, he quickly notes that he depends heavily on all of the academy’s personnel, more than half of whom have master of fine arts degrees.

Ms. Swenson, Flowers’s boss, also praises the young staff, which includes former editors and journalists, as well as Web experts. “They are all devoted to poetry,” she says. It’s a highly interactive atmosphere, she adds, “and fired by the art of words raised to their high-test power.”

In the end, there’s still some mystery as to how that “fire” continues to inspire excitement. But the heat can be felt all across the country, even in newsrooms, where reporters who once thought of poetry as “marginalized” or a “dead art form” now have a reason to cover the subject. For those of us who love poetry, that’s a step in the right direction.

And it’s all thanks to one hardworking staff, which is already planning for next April.

I usually feel like a seamstress when I interview a poet. I ask a wide range of questions and then piece together the responses, trying to make a cohesive whole.

But when I interviewed Jane Hirshfield (below) recently, she made me feel more like a needle, diving into a sea of multi-hued fabric.

That was especially true when we talked about the approach she brings to her writing. Her training in Zen Buddhism – she spent three years in a monastery – gives her a perspective on mental attention that many will find helpful in our sound-bite, never-slow-down world. For her, the writing process is about more than finding an answer to some question – although that’s where her poems begin.

Writing is about more than identifying a tear in “the fabric of our contentment or inattention” – as she calls it – and stitching the torn parts back together so that what's left is “something stronger and deeper than the original material before it required re-making.”

Her ideas really struck me, because they help answer some age-old questions: How do I bring my writing more fully to the page? How do I train my thinking so that I’m more open and effective as a writer?

The labels we give ourselves – spiritual poet, nature poet, language poet, etc. – don’t really mean much.

What does matter, and what colors poetry, is the experience of plunging into and rising up from that mental space where we feel most alive, most essential, most ourselves. This sounds esoteric, I know, but every poet needs to find some way to reach this place. The questions and answers below, which didn’t fit into the profile I wrote on Hirshfield, may help in that process.

What kind of mind-set do you have when you write? 
My poems usually begin, paradoxically, in silence rather than words. Nothing new can arrive if the canvas is already filled, already crowded, and so each new poem, for me, comes out of a kind of unknowing and waiting in the face of whatever question is in me. This silence becomes a form of invitation, into which some new answer can begin to emerge.   

The kind of silence I’m describing shouldn’t be confused with nothingness. It’s more like a honing of concentration, or like the attentiveness of a hunter waiting to see what new life might be coming into view. A good poem creates some fresh distillation of life, worth remembering, worth revisiting.

And though it must come from your own life – what else is present, when sitting in that quiet place, but everything you are and know and have lived – it also feels like something that has arrived from a place of mystery, outside the already known.

Is writing like meditation?
Meditation and writing are, I feel, parallel paths. Each is a matter of entering into an altered state of mind and concentration, each is an opening toward what comes, shaped by the intention of invitation – 'I’ll open this door and see what comes through it.' The door is opened by the quality of the seeing.

What kind of meditation do you do?
Meditation is by its nature hard to describe objectively. But the form of zazen meditation I practice is called shikantaza: ‘just sitting.’ Its quality is that of a goal-less, ever-deepening awareness.

You sit, you breathe, you stay awake to what is. Just that. Eihei Dogen, who founded this particular school of Soto Zen in the 13th century, once said, “Enlightenment is intimacy with all things.” That feeling of intimacy, and of the immediacy and connection that exist between your own life and everything, is the experience of this kind of zazen.

“Just sitting,” without interruption or defense or distraction, you might notice that you are neither the instrument nor the player of your own existence. As with many simple things, the effect can change everything.

Tell me about the voice in your poems.
Voice in poetry is akin to a fingerprint: it cannot help but reveal the full and unique life behind it. It is not only what is said, but how: the timbre, the order of occurrence, what’s there and what isn’t there.

Voice comes from the part of the self that’s larger than the ego and larger than what can be consciously known. When I write my poems, in part what’s happening is that I hear them – not as an actual auditory hallucination, but they come in words, and those words have an intonation and a music that is a part of what they mean.

Is the imagination, or the self, enough? Or must you engage with the outside world?
I think there has to be engagement. Imagination and self can’t exist in isolation. Even a person who seeks out as much solitude as  I do must recognize that human experience and any sense of human meaning emerge from the meeting of inner and outer worlds and of moving through our engagement with others, whether those others are people or the existence of trees and insects and rivers and stones.

Self can’t exist in a vacuum, it’s made both of what we perceive as the self-inside-the-skin, so to speak, and of everything around that self. So the idea of any self-sufficient self is something of an illusion – at times a useful one, but still, more an image or a metaphor than the reality of who and what we are.

Our connection with all of existence is unbreakable as long as we live. It’s the source of our passion, our grief, our thoughts, our physical sustenance, and certainly our art, which is made after all of the shared substances of the world: language, stone, pigment, motion, song.”

Do you try to live a certain way?
I attempt to live with an honest, perhaps even a brutally honest attentiveness. I don’t know any other path than this to try to be an open and vulnerable participant in my life and what it brings me.

Everything I think about the nature of this life comes down to seven words: “Everything is connected; everything changes; pay attention.” And really, you only need the last two – if you’re paying attention, you’ll find out whatever else you need to know.

Do you have a muse of some sort?
'The muse' is really a name for the generative and creative power which is already present, or potentially present, in each of us, and yet not within the ego’s conscious control. Maybe the closest parallel would be to say that for me the muse of writing is similar to the one found in dreaming. We make the dreams, and yet the dreams are larger and wilder that we ourselves could ever be.

Is it a matter of tapping into some universal intelligence, where the poem has already been written?

No, I don’t think there’s a great supermarket in the sky where we can just go shopping for inspiration and wisdom and original thought and perception. It’s harder than that, and we ourselves have more responsibility than that.

If we want to live in a way that isn’t shallow or superficial or more than half asleep, we have to do our part. The life matters. Our job is to cultivate the field so it can grow something never quite seen before.”

Does that sense of discovery change or improve the poet? 
I’d say “enlarge” or even “liberate” rather than “improve.” Where does the self begin and end anyhow? Poetry crafts a larger self, one that knows more than the self that began writing the poem. That self isn’t quite 'me.' It’s closer to “us.”

All of us, even the trees and the mountains, each proposing each moment’s questions and answers to the great mystery that is existence. Maybe the only important exchange going on every moment is the question of attendance. “Here?” the universe asks us. 'Here,' we answer. Fulfilling that 'here' is what we will have of our life, in all its examinable and passionate details.

A reader messaged me recently to comment on a piece I’d done about struggling with writer’s block:

“It seems possible to me that poetry and writing are occupations that some of us take up as a matter of identity,” he wrote. “It means something to be a poet or to be a writer that an individual finds valuable in some way.

Taking up that identity does not necessarily mean that one has something to say, no matter how practiced his or her technique might be. Nor is it true that simply because one has been able to write something valuable at some point in their life that all the rest of their life is to be about writing. Any more than the 20-some years we may put into parenting means that 'parent' is the only thing we are in life, or even that 'parent' is a role we will play until we die.

Perhaps ‘writer’s block’ is simply a state where one has nothing to say. In which case, silence is the most useful thing.”

My first response was, “Ouch, he thinks I have nothing to say.” I admit it, my feathers were ruffled.

When I got home, I looked at the peacock feathers I have in a blue glass vase. I met the bird who once owned those feathers (he dropped them) at St. Mary’s College in Maryland a few years ago, when I was a speaker at their literary festival. His feathers were ruffled, too, because all the peahens on campus ignored him, despite his obvious good looks.

Since he couldn’t get their attention, he would stand for hours, looking at his reflection in the windows of the arts building. He was devoted to that image. Even in heavy rain he would gaze admiringly at his beloved, unmoved by the cold or the wet.

Occasionally he would notice us humans, and if we stopped to watch him, he’d put on his finest show. Those dazzling feathers would fan out behind him, forming a blue-green half-shell. He would stand, head high, while we oohed and aahed, and then he’d turn around and pose for the windows. Back and forth he would turn, so both audiences could see him.

One day I stood there for 30 minutes, wondering how long the performance would continue. There was something so sad and charming about this bird, which wanted – demanded – attention.

He reminds me of the inner peacock we artists have – the desire to be noticed and appreciated for the hard work we have done.

That bird can be an asset, when kept in check.

It displays its finery when we struggle to complete difficult poems. “There’s something valueable here, keep going,” it says. It pushes us to keep sending out work, despite possible rejection. It’s the tiny voice that whispers, “I have something worth saying and sharing.”

Some people feel that the joy of writing should be all the reward we need, but imagine if Seamus Heaney, Robert Frost, or Elizabeth Bishop had kept their poems in a drawer. Imagine if Shakespeare had said, “Ah, don’t waste your time with my plays.” The peacock has an essential role.

The problem is when “I have something to offer” is replaced by “look at me.” Too much window-gazing isn’t good for the writer or the audience.

I’m sure the man who messaged me understood that. He probably also knew that window-gazing often covers up a lot of insecurity. “Look at me, so you don’t notice that I have nothing to say.”

In that case, the writer has to dig deep. Resistance to hard work and personal growth may be the problem. Sometimes it’s simply a need to do more living.

And sometimes the peacock just needs to hear, “Aren’t you gorgeous. No one else has your style. Now go do something constructive.”

It's not a subject that poets discuss over dinner, or at literary parties. If someone does raise the issue, we murmur a few perfunctory words, followed by "pass the hummus, please."

Yet the more we ignore the elephant in the corner, the more damage it does, breaking one chair after another and then taking aim at the walls.

The elephant is the poetic economy, of course. The sagging poetic economy, since book sales are abysmal and more people write poetry than read it.

But no one knows how to fix the problem, so we cover our eyes and whisper, “Shhh, he’ll go away if he can't see us.“

Unfortunately, that approach didn't work when we were 2-year-olds, and the elephant isn't falling for it, either.

John Barr, a successful investment banker, prefers to look the pachyderm right in the eye. And as president of the Poetry Foundation, he's trying to tame the unruly creature by implementing several initiatives intended to jumpstart the poetic economy at both the macro (large scale) and micro (individual) levels.

One major factor, as he explains in “Six or Seven Ways to a Better Poetry,” an unpublished manifesto, is that writers ignore – or forget – their job description. “The poet’s job, basically, is to celebrate life. Poetry’s limitations in the past century come not from failures of craft but from afflictions of spirit,” Barr writes. “A Bosnian survivor reading our American literature of despair, with its spiritual quality of dispossession, might compare our own lives to his own and ask, ‘So, what’s the problem?’ "

The problem, it seems, is a steady diet of self-imposed darkness with no hint of respite or redemption. Who wants to swallow that, especially when each thin book costs $15 or $20?

Another part of the equation, argues Barr, is that poets tend to live narrow lives, especially those in academia. They confine themselves to the ivy walls, rather than following the example of Ernest Hemingway, who sought out new experiences – African safaris, driving an ambulance during the Spanish civil war – in order to feed his writing. “When did you last meet a contemporary poet who takes that approach, seeking out fresh experience or new knowledge specifically for the benefit of his or her poetry?” Barr writes. “If you would write better, live differently,” he urges.

Barr isn’t the first to make such observations, nor is he trodding virgin ground when he points out the dangers of “the MFA poem,” which is written in free verse, in the present tense, and is “single-mindedly personal.”

He is, however, connecting the dots between individual "producers" and the market as a whole. “Poetry needs to find its audience again, and address it." To do this, poets must bear in mind the impact of "what they write on how their readers live.”

That's a polite way of saying there's a cost and a consequence for every action, and poets have reaped what they've sown – unwittingly, perhaps – in vivid, disappointing ways. Even if Barr can improve the poetic economy, rebuilding its infrastructure and improving delivery methods, he can't make people buy a product they don't want.

That's the real elephant here. Shh, don't let it hear you.

A reader in France e-mailed me a question recently: "What do you do when words desert you?"

That’s a very different question than, "How do you deal with writer’s block?"

Often a block is temporary, and can be dissolved once the cause is identified.

Losing your words is much scarier, because the situation feels like a second shadow, and the voice that speaks to you over and over sounds suspiciously like your own. “Forget about writing again," it whispers with soft insistence. "You never really had the gift of poetry to start with. That was a fluke, an illusion."

Don’t let that mockingbird fool you.

If you listen, it will flood your mind with its chatter. It will follow you from room to room and build nests in the backyard. Once that happens, it will attack anyone – or anything – that approaches.

Shoo the annoying bird away – no matter how loud it squawks – and then the cat hiding under the bushes can emerge.

Poetry often disguises itself that way, sitting so still that you almost miss it, except for the occasional flick of the tail or a tiny half-meow that says, “Feed me.”

If you’ve ignored poetry for a while, or it seems to have ignored you, then the cat may be in someone else’s yard, and you need to go find it.

Once you do, the feline will test your devotion, just as art will, circling a bit closer each time, but always remaining slightly out of reach. “How badly do you want me?” is the unspoken question both ask.

That’s what happened to me last summer, when I was trying to reclaim my poetry after months – years, really – of estrangement.

I had to relearn the rule of cats. Don’t pursue them, coax them.

In my case, the teacher was a white and orange feline that I happened to notice as I was walking down the street one day. The cat was sitting on the lawn of a large, prim white house that stands next door to a small, slouching cream house.

I said hello to the little sphinx, which ran toward me, and then backed away when I stuck out my hand.

When he approached again, I could see how very thin he was, with bald patches on his head and neck.

“You could be a beautiful creature,” I told him. But that would mean my feeding him every day – since no one else was, obviously – and sitting on the edge of the lawn every night, until he trusted me enough to let me look at his wounds.

“How badly do you want me?” was the nightly challenge.

Poetry asks the same thing, with a twist. “Do you want me enough to believe in your own abilities? Will you trust your silent center, rather than all those other voices?”

Those are difficult questions, especially if the world – or the face in the mirror – has convinced you that you have nothing valuable or new to say.

If you answer in the affirmative, though, poetry, like that cat, will assert its authority. It will allow you to lounge on the lawn one night, and make you sit in the middle of the sidewalk the next, even though you’re attracting the neighbors’ attention.

I can’t tell you how foolish I felt, sitting two or three feet away from the road as car after car sped by.

Night after night a local man walked past me, on his way back from some secret destination. He would stop and ask the same questions:

“Is the cat a boy or a girl?”

“A boy,” I’d answer.

“What’s her name?”

"I don't know."

A four-year-old girl who lives in the cream-colored house often came outside with questions of her own. One evening, she wanted me to see her pink princess blanket. The two of us – and the cat – sat on the blanket on that dirty strip of pavement and acted as if the situation were perfectly normal.

That’s what poetry asks us to do – to outgrow our hesitancy and disbelief, our paralyzing self-consciousness.

That’s when the words return. They insist on following you home, just as that orange-and-white stray finally did.

I named him Rumi, by the way, after the great mystic poet.

My coworkers often remind me that poets are like the emperor who strutted around buck naked, thinking that only a select few could see his fine new clothing. We view ourselves as artistic and intellectually gifted, they say, yet others see us as arrogant, with egos too large to fit in any carriage. That’s one reason mainstream readers don’t have much use for us, I’m told.

My poet friends argue that people don’t recognize the value of poetry because they don’t encounter it regularly in the media – in newspapers, on TV, on radio programs.

There’s some truth to both views.

Yet even when newspapers do cover poetry, “average readers” often find little they can relate to. The faces they see in poetry’s mirror look nothing like their own, they say.

That was not the case with Ted Kooser, poet laureate of the United States. When my interview of him ran Nov. 16 (www.csmonitor.com/books/index.html), several people in the newsroom told me, “He sounds like such a delightful man. I bet I’d like his poetry, too.” No other poet had ever inspired such comments.

Another first: the Kooser piece made the Top 10 list of Monitor stories for that day (as determined by the number of hits to csmonitor.com). Consequently, I’m still answering reader e-mails about which of his books they should read first.

Part of this response came from the fact that Kooser’s life decisions, as well as his stylistic choices, are easy to understand. People saw their own stories in his.

Equally important – and what really struck me during the interview – was Kooser’s openness. He didn’t seem to have the practiced persona that many writers do (perhaps as a form of self defense?). I never had to wonder, “Where does the persona end and the real man begin?”

As a reporter, I want to glimpse the private person, the inner self that produces the poems. But many people hide that essential core behind a well-polished public mask. For a poet talking about what it means to be truly human, a rigid public facade is tantamount to a death-mask. Those are the worst interviews.

I didn't have that problem with Kooser, however. Everything about him was delightfully surprising, even during our initial chat, when I requested the interview. I expected an answering machine to pick up after two rings, but instead I heard, “Ted Kooser.”

“I’m free all this week,” he said, when I made my request. “How about tomorrow?" (Normally it takes weeks or months to set up a time.)

Mr. Kooser was so honest and approachable during our conversation, even when I asked him about an unflattering Q & A that the New York Times magazine had run earlier that week. “Yes, that was a bit peculiar,” he said without a trace of anger. “But I liked the picture.” Many poets – myself included – would not have been so generous, especially since that reporter had taken 10 days of his time, he told me.

But Kooser didn’t let that unpleasantness affect his interaction with me. He offered details that some writers could have blown out of proportion, such as the fact that his dogs mean a great deal to him (“They’re devoted to me, and I to them.”) or that the University of Nebraska discontinued his fellowship after the first year of his master’s program. (He finished the degree by taking night classes.)

Kooser gave me an hour of his time. (Many people want to wrap things up in 20 or 30 minutes). He even offered to chat with me again if I needed more quotes.

Perhaps he is always that generous, especially since he understands how reporters operate. (Both his wife and son are journalists.) Whatever the reason, Kooser’s approach becomes a bridge for both reporters and readers. He’s a conduit of sorts, which allows him to reach a wide audience.

Other writers could also serve as gateways to the art form, even if their work isn’t as approachable as the current poet laureate’s. Personal stories – and how they relate to the writing – can be very effective hooks, especially if told with a bit of humor.

Subjects who hold tightly to their masks, however, will never have the same impact. Why interview people who never relinquish their death-grip? Why read their poems?

Kooser’s growing reputation as a mirror for mainstream readers may help him tremendously when he attends the American Library Association’s Midwinter Meeting in January. (He recently addressed the National Council of Teachers of English convention.) Kooser plans to work with teachers and librarians because both groups have an unparalleled opportunity to introduce people to verse.

His approach may also help with another initiative he recently announced: He will write a weekly column about poetry that newspapers across the country can run for free. The Poetry Foundation in Chicago will provide distribution.

Convincing newspapers to give up space for free won’t be easy. But if Kooser’s prose is as engaging as he was on the phone, he may prove to editors and readers that they can see themselves in poetry’s mirror. He may even show that the emperor isn’t bare-bottomed after all.

A poet friend told me about a strange scene he saw last week. Police had stopped traffic in his Boston neighborhood so a funeral procession could pass uninterrupted. The lineup began, as many do, with three policemen on motorcycles, followed by two black limos. But then there was an ambulance – an ambulance? – trailed by dozens of cars with funeral placards.

My friend later learned that the funeral was for a young Marine killed in Iraq. Inside the ambulance was his father, now a resident of Florida, who'd been so overcome by grief that he tried to set himself on fire. The story had been all over the news.

After a long silence, my friend and I started talking about poetry – its ability to offer comfort or solace, to be an antidote, even briefly, to the news. That's one of the things we love most about the art form, and I don’t think we’re alone.

Good poems are like secular prayer, or a primal scream that comes from someone else’s mouth. The right words remind you that you’re not alone. In some ways, they release you. Perhaps that’s why so many people feel an instinctive pull toward verse in times of trouble, even if they haven’t read a stanza in decades.

I kept thinking of these things – news and poetry, agony and antidote, the Marine’s father and unspeakable longing. Every time I pulled a book of poems from my shelf, the image of that ambulance sprang to mind. Does this effort measure up? Is there any balm here? Anything worth passing along?

Too often the answer was no (and I say this about my own poems, as well), despite that famous quote from William Carlos Williams: “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

In most cases, I would have settled for some genuine humanity, never mind lifesaving news. But even that was hard to find, especially when I picked up some recent literary journals, to see what they offered.

None of the poems seemed to get past the level of intellectual gymnastics. The prose about poetry was even worse, especially when it spent as much time complaining about an author’s personality as what he or she had written.

Attitude was more important than insight, it seemed, and anyone who’d made headlines was fair game. What would that grieving father think of such peevishness?

Most likely he wouldn’t have cared about the poetry world’s machinations, given what he had lost. But I raise the question because too often we poets have no idea how our behavior comes across to the general public. What might seem like scholarly debate to us looks like petty foolishness to people who are worried about burying a child, paying for daycare, or losing unemployment benefits.

One piece of commentary I read would have left many Americans saying, “See, this is why no one pays attention to poets.” The author, who may have been aiming for humor, went on and on about how useless poet laureates are. The wrong people get chosen (there is some truth to that), and making the art form accessible dilutes and debases it. Who wants his poems to be understood?

The “keep yourself pure and obscure” argument may be fashionable – in print and at literary parties – but it isn’t new or particularly helpful. In fact, it’s another example of how poets don’t see things the way others do.

Many in the literary world think that poet laureate appointments are meant to reward the best of the best. The title is one more prize to add to a full trophy chest.

Ideally, state and US laureates should be our finest writers. But news flash, many “average” Americans think that laureates are chosen for their benefit, and they believe that a laureate’s job is to connect with people who might not find poetry’s salve – or its passion – any other way.

Personally, I agree with that viewpoint, and I admit to feeling a twinge of hope whenever someone new is appointed. I want another Robert Pinsky – who continues his Favorite Poems project several years after leaving the office – or another Billy Collins, who brought poetry into high school classrooms in a subtle, non-threatening way.

Those are the laureates most people will remember. The ones who made news for all the right reasons. The ones who make the public feel that poets do care about the feelings of people riding in black limos or the back of ambulances.

A friend of mine called me last week, sobbing. She's had writer's block for several weeks, and the more she worries about it, the more entrenched the block becomes. Now she's at the point where she feels as if she's underwater, without enough breath to reach the surface.

I can certainly understand that feeling. I've recently overcome a block of my own.

"Are you afraid you have nothing to say?" I asked. "Do you need to live a little? Maybe let things 'compost' a bit?"

No, that wasn't the problem, she said. She was worried about big life issues – possible layoffs and a romance that wasn't working – two more things I understand.

"What if I lose everything?" she asked. "What if I can't find another job? Should I give up my apartment? Move back in with my parents?"

"Slow down," I told her. "Every 'what if' pushes an image or phrase back down into the whirpool. How do you normally get past a block?"

She couldn't think of anything, so I told her about two approaches I've used.

When I first moved to Boston, I'd hop in the car and drive three hours north, to Goose Rocks Beach, in Maine. There, the water is cold, not frigid, and the tide washes in hundreds of sand dollars each day. I'd grab a pail, wade in to my waist, and bend down, over and over, reaching for the round white shapes that look like communion wafers.

I'd bend and scoop until my legs went numb. Then I'd carry the bucket up to my towel, set it down, and head back toward the water. After an hour of floating in the sun and the salt I'd be totally limp, every worry dropping to the ocean floor below.

"I'm not really the nature type," she told me.

"So try something more urban," I suggested. "Pinball, followed by a large chocolate ice cream. There's no faster – or cheaper – form of escapism."

"Pinball?" she asked incredulously. "My life and career are falling apart and you want me to play an arcade game?"

"Yes," I explained, "because the game is a metaphor for what you're dealing with."

I told her all about the machine I used to play in grad school. The lights would flash – yellow, red, and white – each time I earned bonus points. But when I missed a simple shot, the ball rolling right between both flippers, the carnival-like music would grow louder.

"Great," she laughed. "A game with attitude that's going to mock me. No thanks."

"So try prayer," I said. "Or yoga."

She groaned, so I went back to the pinball idea, explaining how my first game was always annoyingly fast – ball one, two, and three going where they shouldn't. Game over. Another two quarters.

But once my mind shifted into neutral, the games lengthened and scores began to rise: 300,000, 500,000, 1,000,000. Occasionally I'd even win a free game. By that point, my worries, like the silver spheres, were
completely under my control. Red, yellow, white. Goodbye.

She wasn't convinced by my low-brow approach to her high-minded problem.

"Look, whatever you do, just cut yourself some slack," I said before we hung up. "Don't try to force it. Just stop thinking."

I know I gave her good advice, but it probably didn't help. It didn't help me a few weeks ago, when friends told me the same thing. Neither did reading an article called "Blocked" in a June issue of the New Yorker, by
Joan Acocella. In the first few pages Ms. Acocella lists a whole range of theories – biological, psychological, linguistic – why writers shut down, and she names many prominent authors who never regained their ability to write. After the third page I was so discouraged, I threw the magazine aside in disgust. Most serious writers have reached this point once or twice.

Most people also know that the block won't subside until you've dealt with some of the underlying fears. That was certainly the case for me.

One night I found myself walking toward a Ferris wheel near the harbor of a city I was visiting. I couldn't explain why I was so drawn to the ride – perhaps it was the red, yellow, and white lights. Or maybe it was the giant circle.

Either way, as the wheel slowly turned, I thought about a comment I'd heard at a poetry reading the night before. "I go to my doubt every day," said one writer.

Many poets do. But we get in trouble – I do, anyway – when we stay in that place too long. Doubt is like a lover that does nothing but slap you around.

The Ferris wheel helped me calm my thought some, but the red, yellow, and white lights weren't enough. I needed more altitude and perspective, so I went to the observatory 94 stories above the city. From there I could see patterns in the traffic and the water that I hadn't noticed before. Everything moved to a gentler rhythm. I relaxed for the first time in weeks.

My block didn't fully give way, however, until I was back in Boston, waiting for my suitcase at the baggage carousel. One bag after another moved toward me, briefly looking like mine. I started to notice certain patters and colors, much as I did when I collected sand dollars. "Oh," I thought, "this is just like writing. I don't create the patterns, I just notice them. I let them move through and past me."

A few days after my friend's phone call, I rang her just to check in. We spent an hour talking about the fine balance writing requires: sometimes you take action, sometimes you just let go. The same is true when thinking about layoffs, or any big challenge. You take the necessary steps and do everything you can, but when life pins your arm behind you, you must stop fighting until a new thought or option comes along.

She wasn't saying much, so I read her a passage from that New Yorker article, which I eventually finished: "With so many ordinary facts lurking behind its impressive name, writer's block may come to seem just that, a name, and names can be dangerous.... Possibly, some writers become blocked simply because the concept exists, and invoking it is easier for them than writing.... But for most writers the danger of 'block' is that it gives them something to scare themselves with."

"That didn't help," she said sadly. "It's almost as useless as your pinball idea."

I stand by the pinball method. Whenever I start playing, even in my mind, my worries become like the large silver balls – something I can knock around. Red, yellow, white. Winning score.

My friend still hasn't tried the game, but perhaps she'll find another way to take aim at her fears. I'd love to see her knock them away, rather than waste time worrying – as I did for several weeks. It's so much easier to take a deep, slow breath, still the surface of your mind, and begin to look for patterns, in whatever way they choose to arrive. Eventually a phrase or image will replace those shiny balls. Red, white, and yellow, sound and sense intertwined.

Red, yellow, white. Game over.