One chance, One life. Make it or screw it up, it's your choice. Don't wait to long or your time will be up.

Poetry can explain individuals to ourselves, and change our attitudes, and help us see the complexity of the world, but the kind of poetry I follow isn't going to change public opinion directly. Other art forms can - if you're a TV writer, you have some interesting challenges, or if you're a country musician, somebody like Brad Paisley. But poetry not so much.

Gunn would be an important figure-rewarding, delightful, accomplished, enduring-in the history of English-language poetry even were his life not as fascinating as it now seems; he would be an important figure in the history of gay writing and in the history of transatlantic literary relations even were his poetry not so good as it is. With his life as it was and his works as they are, he's an obvious candidate for a volume of retrospective and critical essays, and this one is first-rate.

Powell belongs, in fact to the first generation of American poets who may have grown up without even a vestigial connection to the accentual-syllabic, rhyming English tradition - his inventive lines have this absence at their back.

If we recover something like a functioning, well-informed democratic polity - if it hasn't been wrecked for good by the people who are getting in now, if millennials and teenagers can come to maturity in a world where we hold free and fair elections and agree on what fact is - Lin-Manuel Miranda is going to have a lot to do with that.

Good poems do a lot of things at once. Often, by doing so, they encourage us to acknowledge mixed and incompatible feelings. Good poems, like good works of history, resist monocausal explanations for anything. There's not one reason why I am angry or excited or hopeful, when I feel those things. And there's not one reason why President Obama won two elections. And there's not one reason why Donald Trump won the most recent presidential election.

In the arts, in places where you're not going to save lives or save species, I think there's no reason to play ball. I can't imagine a serious poet who would want to write or perform for most recent inauguration. I'd be very surprised if there were an inaugural poem, and I can't really imagine what that would be.