Our lives are so dominated by financial concerns - paying the rent - and consumer choices - what sort of detergent to buy at Costco - that larger issues get subsumed into economic ones. Not just social justice, but basic issues of faith and meaning.

It's not surprising to me that books ended up playing a central role in my life, but it is somewhat mysterious that poetry did.

The shape that poems make in the mind is an echo of something powerful in the cosmos. I do believe that, and that is certainly irrational, so perhaps I am no wiser than Elizabeth Perkins as to the nature of poetry.

Poems are language turned into art; sound and sense matter; they can be as long or longer than The Odyssey or as short or shorter than a haiku. Not very helpful.

All of the arts are kin - music and sculpture and dance, those are wordless art forms. But poetry is defined by language. Of course, each art is distinct, and has its own character - not just in terms of media, but in terms of what seems to lie at the heart of it.

A poem employs both the sound and the sense of language, it treats words not just as signifiers but as a plastic medium of artistic expression.

Our lives are so dominated by financial concerns - paying the rent - and consumer choices - what sort of detergent to buy at Costco - that larger issues get subsumed into economic ones. Not just social justice, but basic issues of faith and meaning.