It may very well be that we have entered another time when most poets will feel compelled to use poetry to stop things from happening. Yet I believe that even if poetry did not do this, it would be vital to our survival.

Music and songs have always been a constant part of my life, and still are. My brother Michael, who is a songwriter and composer, is the one who most fully inherited the musical legacy of our family, but I got some part of it - mostly the feel.

Somewhere back a whiskey or so ago I wrote that thinking was a real thing in the world, just like anything else. I mean that very literally, materially. And it's true about poems, too.

The question does arise if how and why to write poetry in this time. It feels both completely essential and also quite difficult. But that's how writing poetry has felt to me my whole life. Everything seems to have just gotten immensely more mortal and tragic and scary, which makes it hard to concentrate, but also, if harnessed, can provide immense energy for making poems.

My own experience as a reader and writer has been that the more I read, and the more I live, the more different "types" of poetry I grow to love. I might not even believe anymore that there are "types" of poetry at all. I've come to love things I once would snootily have dismissed. Of course I still have my likes and dislikes, and there are things I think are just plain old bullshit, but more and more I am far more trusting of my loves than my dislikes.

All my closest friends came to me through poetry. My wife, too! Other than my family, poetry is the gravitational force of my life.

I don't think poetry needs to be "easily understandable." First of all, there are often complexities of syntax, form, unfamiliar absences, etc., that require a deeper concentration than is usually demanded of us. So that, right off the bat, is a little difficult. Then there is the deeper issue of what poetry is really asking of us. I feel it is asking us to read with great, even sacred, care and attention. That, too, is difficult. It requires discipline and the creation of a temporary zone of privacy, which is inimical to our current conditions of life.