My poetry blog comes full circle today with “Professor,” the last Sunday poem that I will post – for the time being, anyway – in the Journal of Radical Wonder. The weekly feature began last April with “Openings,” a poem about a toddler learning to say the word “window” in the crib, and it ends now with a piece about a woman who is past the point of learning new words. No doubt she could if she wanted to, but she is now over eighty and nearing the end of a life spent enlightening others, and her craving for new knowledge is slight. If she is to learn something world-changing, it may require a change to the next world. I am not sure if old age is really like that, but I can guess.
 
Sometimes, as authors, we create characters as cautionary examples. Sometimes, we create them for entertainment or adventure. Other times, we simply craft them as examples of qualities that we like -- an easy enough feat in poetry, which doesn’t require us to test their personalities with a conflict-laden storyline. The title character of “Professor” is one of my personal favorites, and I have no interest in constructing a 300-page novel around her. She is content to stay on the beach. This poem originally appeared in The First Thing Mastered, a chronological collection about the first few decades of life, but it doesn’t appear in a section about old age; the book doesn’t have one. Instead, it’s grouped with the poems about college life and young adulthood. In the context of the book, the protagonist of the poem is not the professor herself, but the undergraduates who seek her attention. It doesn’t matter that they contribute little to the poem themselves. Our life story is a shared one, defined sometimes by our encounters with others, and sometimes we inch out of the spotlight to let older and wiser ones borrow it.
 
If you are a person of a certain age reading this blog, you must have had mentors who inspired you growing up: professors, high school teachers, coaches, maybe even bosses. I had many such people, and as I write this sentence, I hope that at least a few of them will read it. The greatest tribute that I can give them is to show that I absorbed their wisdom. In the case of “Professor,” the title character’s wisdom is simplicity. She is not Charles Foster Kane, dying in a shadowy mansion with “No Trespassing” signs looming on the gates. As death (or at least emeritus status) approaches, she steadily parts with clutter. During her office hours, she no longer meets in an office at all, but lets students seek her out on a bench overlooking the ocean. She is up front about her buck teeth and the scar on her gum; physical beauty no longer matters. A widow, she has stopped driving and recently donated her late husband’s belongings to the Good Will. Even as a professor, she no longer feels the need to prove her astuteness. When students ask her questions, she responds with questions. Like Socrates’ pupils, they can teach themselves the answers.
 
Twice in the poem (quoted in italics, which are less definite), the professor states, I am giving myself back. She wants to leave a small footprint, as we say in modern times. Does that make her selfless? Not at all -- we cannot be selfless by nature. There is an art, though, to projecting a self that is not crass or obnoxious. The professor has worked assiduously at a graceful exit. Perhaps her last incarnation benefits the environment; she seems to use few resources, even as she notes the climate change that has brought up sea levels around her. Perhaps her example inspires students. She certainly will not provide as much work for movers as some of us do upon death. Her one act of true initiative in the poem, in the spirit of Mary Poppins, is to feed the birds. They are excited to see her, and she returns their enthusiasm. Her fingers shake as she opens the Ziploc bag and tosses the crumbs. She wonders if she will get an eternal reward for feeding them. Some of us never stop puzzling about karma.
 
And that is where the poem ends, and also where my year in the Journal of Radical Wonder ends. Years ago, I was grateful for the mentors who helped to give me a voice. Right now, I am grateful for the Radical Wonder staff who have given that voice a platform. Like the professor in my poem, they encourage others to speak for themselves. They believe in the power of wonder. They certainly are not in it for the money. As I write this, the most recent submissions on the website are Tiffany Elliott’s prose poem “Sisterhood,” Margaret Sefton’s short story “Breakthrough Queen.” Read them both. Savor what they have to tell you. Think of them like the crumbs scattered to those birds -- small but fulfilling, a promise of being fed again, an assertion in the face of those rising tides.

My year of blogging is coming to an end. Last year, at the beginning of April, my poem "Openings" appeared in the Journal of Radical Wonder, and I resurrected this blog -- which had been dormant for years -- to write about it. Since then, I have published a new poem every Sunday and added a pair of extra ones around the new year, due to the serendipity of having written three poems that take place on consecutive dates. I cannot thank John Brantingham and the rest of the Radical Wonder staff enough for the opportunity to publish work in a consistent venue, which in turn allowed me to revisit old poems and reflect on the inspiration behind them (and, in some cases, the hindsight that sometimes caused me to read them differently). It has been a year of renewal and discovery, but the time has come to divert my creative energy elsewhere, and so the Sunday poetry blog will go on hiatus at the end of March.

​A few of the poems from Radical Wonder have been new ones. I haven't written much about those on the blog; I get tight-lipped with new pieces, perhaps because I want to let them speak for themselves. With the older submissions, which are now old enough that they feel like the work of a slightly different person, I have had much more to say. As my fellow California poet Paul Kareem Tayyar once put it:

          When it ends the road slips back into what it always was,
          A mirror for the rider to find himself within.

So perhaps this blog has been a mirror. What have I found in it? At the risk of making critical dissertations on myself, I would say that my overriding subject as a poet has been the lives of ordinary people doing the best that they can. The couple in "Last Date Before the Proposal" who carefully scrutinize each other over tea, the parents in "The Girl Concentrates" who buy their daughter a toy space shuttle after a real one explodes on television, the college RA in "Commencement Day" who plans a huge morning prayer and then accepts two people showing up -- they do not always achieve their goals, but they have admirable standards, and life will probably be kind to them eventually. Some of my poems may focus on cruel or indifferent people, but they are in the minority. Most of the protagonists are conscientious, industrious, hopeful, and sometimes a little fretful and hard to please. Of course, that is a perfect description of me. There's your mirror for you.

But the mirror is only one factor here. All of these poems were written by me, but they are written for you. Who are you, exactly? I don't know. I can name a handful of friends and family members whom I can say with assurance will read each new poem, but Christopher Nolan's family and friends undoubtedly go to see his latest movie as well. If we create public art, then we ultimately create it for strangers. A five-star review on Amazon or a royalty check from our publisher alerts us that someone out there has consumed it. Beyond that, the impact of our work is a mystery. Every year, I begin my 6th-grade English class by sharing Stephen King's essay "What Writing Is," in which he compares the connection between a writer and reader to the mythical art of telepathy. If you think about it, his argument makes perfect sense: A writer jots down a set of words in one time and place, and a reader receives it in another. The writer and reader never meet, most likely, but they are on opposite ends of an interaction. In the essay, King gives an example: If he describes a rabbit munching a carrot inside a cage on a table with a red cloth, you will construct that image in your mind, simply because he and you both know what a rabbit, carrot, cage, table, and cloth look like. The writer's audience, ultimately, is any person who knows what the writer is talking about. Perhaps that audience will end up being ten people; perhaps it will be ten million. Perhaps the audience will like the story about the rabbit in the cage; perhaps not. In any case, the connection has been made. One person writes the poem, another reads it, and both look to their respective mirrors.

So here is "Birth," this week's poem in Radical Wonder. (For some reason this morning, Weebly is not letting me embed the link under text, so here is the URL: https://medium.com/the-journal-of-radical-wonder/birth-3f39d9866bfd.) I wrote this poem in 2010, long before I became a parent, but as I look back on it 14 years later, nothing in it seems inaccurate. It is a one-sentence poem built from images that most of us, at least over a certain age, can recognize. The title, first, is straightforward: We all know about babies. Perhaps you have had a newborn yourself, or perhaps you remember your younger siblings or cousins first coming back from the hospital. Even if not, you probably know what a tea kettle is, plus a banister, a mobile, and a newspaper stained with coffee rings. You know the sensation of days that seem to forge their own sense of time, sound that seems soundless, a state of mind that seems both tremendously focused and insanely scattered. The poem begins with the words "This is" before a torrent of nouns. When you start a poem with "This is," you obviously assume that the reader knows what you're talking about. I must have felt that way in 2010.

​Writing is a remarkable invention. I remind my students of that. Thousands of years ago -- not a particularly long time in the scheme of history -- humans developed a system of making marks on a flat surface and having them mean something. We use those marks for all different purposes, but when it comes to poetry or fiction or philosophy, my own belief is that the ultimate benefit of writing is to remind us that we're not alone. We get plenty of empathy from those telepathic voices, and sometimes they just remind us not to give up. So, if you're reading this latest poem between shifts of caring for a newborn, take it from me that the house will tidy itself before long and you'll eventually get your sleep back. And congratulations on your growing family.

I don't miss the days of seeking romantic partners on Craigslist, but I sometimes recall with fondness -- or at least mordant humor -- the insights into human nature that I found there. We are a notoriously needy species, and rarely do our needs stand naked more than when we lay out our criteria for soulmates. One day, scrolling the list of postings, I found one by a woman seeking "Tall Native American Guy Who Likes Punk Rock." Leaving aside the odds of finding a man who met that exact fetish, I wondered if, in the event that the author got lucky, she would find herself marginalized by his own forbidding standards. Suppose there was a tall Native American guy out there who liked punk rock and who was actively seeking a petite Mongolian woman who liked 1940s ballads. Would they still be compatible even if they didn't live up the other's ideals for height, race, and musical acumen?

I will never know. I do know, however, that I once miserably failed a stranger's test on Craigslist, and the tragic flaw turned out to be my height: The post's author listed an extensive series of desirable qualities in a partner, and her list read like an intimate friend's description of me. Then, at the bottom, she added that she was 5'8" -- same as me -- and that she would not accept any partner who was not taller than her. I responded to her and asked if she could settle for a partner who, pun intended, saw perfectly eye to eye with her. She didn't reply.

Our lives are our art, but we don't always approach them like painters or novelists. Sometimes, we work like casting directors. Think back on your own life and count the significant people who weren't imposed on you by family or other inevitable circumstances; chances are that they'll make up the vast majority. In the sandbox at preschool, we choose the other toddlers to play with. As childhood goes on, we choose friends and then choose groups, not necessarily in that order. Eventually, many of us choose a partner to live with. Our criteria may be less silly than demanding tall Navajos who relish the Sex Pistols, but we have criteria nevertheless. My poem this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder, "Last Date Before the Proposal," is about two prospective spouses who are auditioning each other for a part. I wrote this poem more than a decade ago, and it is one that I am particularly proud of, because I have not outgrown it since then. "Love's no romance," Paul Simon once sang. There are definitely such things as love and romance, but they only sometimes intertwine. This poem is about the business end of love. That's not what we pine for on Craiglist, but it's worth asking the tall Native American guy about his credit history and willingness to do the dishes.

"Last Date Before the Proposal" is from The First Thing Mastered, which covers the first three and a half decades of life in chronological order. It comes near the end, with a number of giddier poems before it. As a poet, I have always had a hard time with romance; maybe it requires a surrender of gravity that I have trouble achieving. Maybe Shakespeare and Neruda and the other masters have just said it better than I could. No matter. "Last Date Before the Proposal" is not romantic, but it is about love, and not in a cynical or dismissive way. The characters at the heart of the poem love each other, deeply, and they are asking all the right questions about it. Have they been married already? Maybe; I intended the line "Each of us has been here before" to be ambiguous. Perhaps "here" just means in a state of contemplation, or perhaps they are thinking of their last date in the same location. The pair talk about the films of Akira Kurosawa, but loving his films is not a prerequisite for marriage; the man simply notes that the woman praises them for their humanistic quality. That must mean that she is a good person. If they agree on humanism, then they may grant themselves different tastes in movies or music. What is more important is his hand -- how he keeps it steady, how it is gentle enough to hold the wine glass. Perhaps she has known a more volatile hand in the past.

Love has so little to do with wine. It has so little to do with Kurosawa, or punk rock, or so many other arbitrary things. It is a commitment that is one part bliss and a large part selflessness, collaboration, and responsibility. After being married for twelve years, I would like to think that I know that. The characters in "Last Date Before the Proposal" know it too. We never find out how they fare as a married couple, but we never find out the same about Romeo and Juliet. May they find happiness of the rational kind. The poem ends with a line that I wouldn't have written when I was a few years younger: "We part with a handshake, disguised as a kiss." Shaking hands is one way of holding them. That's what you get for your beautiful ring.

My entry this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder is another new piece, "A Defense of Amateur Sleuthing." I wrote this one after reading an article in the Los Angeles Times by Megan Abbott titled "Why True Crime Calls to Women." (That was the headline in the print edition; it has a different one online.) You may read the article here and the poem here.

Thanks, as always, to John Brantingham and the rest of the Radical Wonder staff for their support.

"Child Shrieking Over a Burst Balloon," a never-before-published poem that I wrote a couple of years ago, appears today in the Journal of Radical Wonder. This poem may find its way into a future collection, or it may simply be a stand-alone piece. In any case, as the title indicates, it's incredibly sad. I have never learned not to wince at the sound of a crying child.

Now is a good time to change the subject, so here are two other recent notable pieces in Radical Wonder:

The other day, a new poem by Tamara Madison -- a writer whom I have long admired, and who was once the online Poet of the Month for Moon Tide Press -- went up on the site. It's called "Give Me Your Clouds," and it reminds me of a favorite piece by D.H. Lawrence, "Craving for Spring," in which the author passionately implores the new season to arrive. Check out Lawrence's piece here, and then see if you detect a similar tone in Madison's:

Give me your clouds
Your big clouds rising like cakes in the oven
Blue clouds heavy-bottomed, looming
High clouds scratched by wind
Clouds like a sun-bleached spine
I want white clouds billowing up
with a narrow sword-gray cloud
ripping through the middle...

Also worth a read is Lavina Blossom's "Holding," which the poet describes as a response to a writing challenge in which she took vocabulary from the first and last lines of a poetry collection (Elizabeth Cantwell's Nights I Let the Tiger Get You) and worked them into an original piece. I haven't read Cantwell's book, but the poem that Blossom wove out of it is quite beautiful, and I give her full permission to use any of my books as her next raw material.

I have never given a performance in Savannah, Georgia, but I have given performances, and I have been to Savannah, and that was inspiration enough to write “Singer on River Street, Savannah, Georgia,” my poem that appears this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder. The subject matter here is interchangeable. Instead of a musician onstage, it could be an athlete entering tryouts or a politician attending a PAC meeting. Savannah might be exchanged for Boston, New Orleans, or the metropolis of your choice. Any activity or location that fires your imagination will do. The poem is about starting something, or trying to, and that concept transcends any time or place -- although, if some times and places didn’t particularly bemuse us, Savannah wouldn’t have such a shimmering night life.
 
This poem first appeared in The First Thing Mastered, a book that contains 44 poems advancing chronologically from birth to middle age. With that collection, I tried to eschew cynicism and irony and capture life as it feels in the moment. No emotion is frivolous when we feel it deeply. The lead character in “Singer” (referred to in the poem as “you,” not “I” or “he”) is a college student who has succeeded in booking a small gig in Savannah’s historic district. Perhaps he is a good musician, perhaps not. Perhaps the show will be his last. The future is unknowable, but he relishes his ability to shape the present: He made this show happen, first by learning to play and forming a band, then by texting the drummer who texted someone else. His thumbs on the iPhone started a chain that eventually led to a show being booked and a listing in the newspaper. Now, between songs, he surveys the crowd (however big) and notices a woman who seems interested in him. Has he found a lover, an agent, maybe both? His mind, and possibly other parts of his body, throb with questions. Then he realizes that it’s time for the next song, and he gives his band the cue.
 
I remember that feeling. For years, I operated Moon Tide Press, a small press that published three or four books a year by Southern California poets. (The press continues to operate under the esteemed leadership of others.) When a new title saw release, I felt giddy. The poet was excited; sometimes it was his or her first book. We sent emails to old college friends, press releases to newspapers, inquiries to mom-and-pop bookstores. Any of those outreaches might have led to an interview, a front-page story, a reading with a sold-out book table. Would the Poetry Foundation take notice? Was an award somewhere in the offing? I have never played the lottery, but I understand the appeal that every ticket may be the one worth $1 million. It is the same with any poem, song, painting, short film, text, tweet, or email. Moon Tide Press was small, and so were Elvis Presley's Sun records and Walt Disney’s first studio. If our initiative turns into legend one day, we want to have bragging rights.
 
Of course, “Singer on River Street, Savannah, Georgia” ends before we know if there is anything to brag about. The poem has no resolution, and I wouldn’t want to write one. Let’s indulge the singer, though, and give him what seems to be within his reach at this riverside club: a contract, a wife, the adoration of strangers. As readers, how much more do we want? I think of the words of Byron in Don Juan:
 
        All tragedies are finish'd by a death,
        All comedies are ended by a marriage;
        The future states of both are left to faith,
        For authors fear description might disparage
        The worlds to come of both, or fall beneath,
        And then both worlds would punish their miscarriage;
        So leaving each their priest and prayer-book ready,
        They say no more of Death or of the Lady.
 
A lot comes after death or the lady, and it doesn’t have to be anticlimactic. For every Presley who finds superstardom a trap, there’s a Disney who seems to relish it to the end. Perhaps the key is staying hungry. Years ago, at UCI, I attended a campus poetry reading in which a professor -- 50 years old, at least -- came to listen to the undergraduates read. He shared a piece or two of his own, then gave a short, eloquent tribute to all those gathered. “I’ve always said that I learn more from my students than they could ever learn from me,” he said. In his mind, was he still a fledgling poet seeking the validation of others? Did he feel like his break was still ahead of him? Since “Singer on River Street” is full of unanswered questions, I’ll refrain from answering these questions too. But look -- I have now finished this blog entry, and I am about to hit “Post” on Weebly. This may be the start of something astonishing. If I didn’t believe in that possibility, I wouldn't write at all.

It is a well-known story that Paul McCartney wrote "Yesterday" after the melody came to him in a dream. Law-abiding Beatle that he was, Paul vetted the tune with his contacts in the music industry to make sure that he hadn't plagiarized it from someone else. He hadn't, and an original classic was born. The moral of the story is clear: As much as we artists pride ourselves on our work, we still get to take credit for pieces that we created unconsciously. That loophole covers dreams, and also words or phrases that we misheard. Exhibit A in the poetry world this week is "Armistice," which first appeared two decades ago and arose from a line that I thought I heard Van Morrison sing. He didn't sing it, in fact, which means that I hold the rights to the mishearing. Given the agonies that sometimes come with being a writer, we can take ecstasies where we can.

The Morrison song in question is "Madame George," an impressionistic ballad from the 1968 album Astral Weeks. Many critics have interpreted the title character as being a transvestite, although Morrison has denied as much in interviews. Regardless, I was familiar with the standard reading of the song before I first heard it, and so when Morrison began the second verse with "Marching with the soldier boy behind," I initially heard it as "Magic left the soldier boy behind." If a soldier boy passes himself off as a beautiful woman, that is surely a magical transformation of some kind. For years, that was my favorite line in the song, until a lyric sheet proved me wrong. My initial disappointment was soon overridden by the realization that the line was now mine, even if Morrison (and his Belfast accent) got credit for the inspiration.

Perhaps you've seen one of those "letter swap" puzzle games. My daughter recently had one as part of her homework. You start with a word and change one letter to make a new word ("life," for instance, becomes "like"), then change one letter of that word ("like" becomes "bike"), and so on until you arrive at something completely new. That Morrison line went through a similar process as I toyed with it in my notebook. "Marching with the soldier boy behind" became "Magic left the soldier boy behind," and then my conscious mind tweaked it again to "Magic left his soldier clothes behind." Three original words, three new ones. Who would leave his soldier clothes behind? In the summer of 2004, when I lived in Connecticut, I overcame a long and particularly brutal stretch of writer's block to answer that question. A general -- "the general," as he's identified in the poem -- strolls into a metropolitan city teeming with nightlife. A war has apparently ended; banners hang in the city square celebrating armistice, while refugees wear black and indulge in wine. Casinos are booming and slot machines provide the soundtrack. The general himself seems mesmerized by the vibe -- flashing the peace sign, treating strangers to drinks, seeking out a church so he can indulge in a spiritual epiphany. At the end of the poem, he vanishes, and the narrator (some anonymous person) retreats to his shabby apartment, still tingling from having witnessed the sublime. Was the general's appearance a dream? A hallucination? A ghost sighting? In the spirit of Van Morrison, who once titled a song "Why Must I Always Explain?", I'll leave that to the reader to decide.

"Armistice" first appeared in Long River Run II, a staple-bound anthology from the Connecticut Poetry Society, in fall 2004. (The title is a reference to the opening words of Finnegans Wake, another enigmatic Irish classic.) It later appeared in my first full-length book, College Town, in 2010, and then stayed dormant until this week, when I submitted it to the Journal of Radical Wonder. Like "City Night," which I blogged about earlier this year, it's an early poem that I look on with fondness, even if I doubt that I would ever write one like it again. I can definitely see a thread that runs through the two poems, plus a number of other ones from that early-2000s period: I was entranced by urban nightscapes, their mystery and danger and titillating promise. College Town begins with a poem called "Night Companion" and ends with "Blues Man," in which a musician passes by the downtown lights after a show. The book opens with an epigraph from Kate Buckley: "I am tall, but not ever so tall as the city at night." Maybe it's no accident that I thought Van Morrison was warbling about magic back then. I may have willed myself to hear it.

One of my favorite movies is After Life, a 1998 Japanese fantasy in which the newly deceased enter a way station between this world and the next. Over the course of a few days, each of them is called on to select his or her favorite memory from Earth, after which a film crew (operating on a modest budget) reenacts it and gives it as a gift. The person then moves on to eternity, carrying nothing but a memory of the moment when life seemed most sublime. I imagine that anyone who watches that film is moved to ponder which memory they would take with them. Of course, I cannot choose one offhand. Perhaps when I was younger, I would have named a moment quickly. With time, I have come to view happiness as the riddle that it is. Do we feel joy most at the moments that seem scripted to offer it: birthdays, holidays, graduations, trips? Do we feel it when we are working hard at our area of expertise? Or does it creep up in disguise during the leaner times, when we face trying circumstances but feel an adrenaline rush at simply being needed by others?

I don't know which type of happiness is best. But I have come to realize, over the years, how hindsight sometimes alters those perfect memories. In After Life, the characters are asked to remember the moment at which they felt happiest, and the movie makes a joke about how many younger entrants to the way station choose visits to amusement parks. I have had many moments in the last 44 years, including Disneyland trips, when I lost myself in a state of bliss. I would not necessarily choose most of them as my most prized memory. They lack a certain aura of accomplishment, of euphoria for the right reason. Yes, my self-critic is at work here. I will let him discriminate. In baseball, we talk about earned and unearned runs. Perhaps there's also earned and unearned happiness. Since I just brought up baseball, I'll give an example of the second type. When I was 14, I attended a game in which the Angels trailed by seven runs in the bottom of the ninth. Astonishingly, they rallied for seven runs in that inning, then won the game in the tenth. At the time, I measured my personal well-being by the Angels' success, and when that runner crossed the plate with the winning run, I felt positively out of body -- so much so that (I distinctly remember) I looked up at the night sky above Anaheim Stadium and felt like a miracle had been bestowed.

​I have rarely felt giddier than at that moment, but 30 years later, I have come to question it. Why was I so happy? I hadn't done anything myself, other than sit in the stands and watch someone else win a game. There was no personal epiphany, no long-awaited payoff. I was living vicariously, as I have steadily learned not to do. So that game comes off the list of contenders if I ever reach that way station myself. Along with it go other moments: winning video games as a child, receiving desired toys for Christmas, taunting classmates who taunted me first. None of them were sufficiently earned. On the other hand, I can list any number of memories that retain their luster over the years: graduations, publications, interviews with remarkable people. In 2013, I hosted the launch for my book The First Thing Mastered at a Mexican restaurant in Orange, inviting dozens of friends and sharing food and poetry. In 2017, my daughter crawled for the first time as I sat holding the camera. Those moments were earned happiness. I hope the 1994 Angels still remember that game fondly, since they did the actual work.

Back to The First Thing Mastered. Ah, I love that book. I started it around the time I got married (more earned happiness) and set out to capture the first three and a half decades of life in chronological order. The challenge that I gave myself was to approach every phase of those years without cynicism or ironic distance, reflecting the world as it actually appears to a baby, a toddler, a preschooler, a teenager, and so forth until the dawn of middle age. I aimed for 91 pages of sincerity. Among the poems in the young-adult section of the book is "Welcome Week," which appears this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder. It is one of the happiest poems I have ever written, largely because it's about the first week of college and doesn't know anything that happens beyond that point. Adulthood is exhilarating at times and maddening at others. So is childhood, of course. But those first days in the dorm -- meeting roommates, hanging posters, and creating a ramshackle group identity -- feel like the discovery of an awesome new frontier. It's a momentary rush of the perks of being a grownup, with the responsibilities and hard truths to come later.

For that matter, it's earned. We've worked hard to get into college, passed the tests and done the paperwork. The driver's license is snug in our pocket. Our adult personality is forged, though it will continue to evolve. The campus looks massive around us, countless times bigger than high school, and lockers and permission slips are behind us. All is anticipation, the belief that every step can birth a new beginning. Few things make us happier than the possibility of happiness. My own welcome week in college came in 1998 at UCI, and the memory lingers brightly after more than 25 years. In the poem, conversations in the dorm become "an improvised session / of laughter and half-invented stories"; the freshman residents hang up a banner to assert their independence, "their group name/ in multicolors defying the empty plains." If nothing after September of 1998 had ever matched that feeling, then I could at least say that I had had it once. I count myself lucky to say that I have had it again. Perhaps that's the true definition of happiness: reaching that way station in the sky, and having to resort to picking something at random.

          Twentieth century, go to sleep.
                  --R.E.M., “Electrolite”
 
The 20th century is fast nodding off. The Greatest Generation approaches single digits. Print newspapers have become a relic. VHS tapes and Life magazines line the shelves of antique stores. A centenarian who was born in 1899 could speak firsthand about a century that turned race, technology, and social mores upside down. I am certainly not that person. But as one who came of age in the century’s last two decades, I remember how it more or less stood at the end. (I am focusing on arts and culture here; politics and other matters may be pondered elsewhere.) If I could compare the coda of the 20th century to anything, it would be a painting in which the original pencil marks were visible behind the flamboyant splotches of color; there was a sense that we had accomplished something remarkable, and we could still trace the steps. Movies were barely a century old, and we could view The Matrix at the multiplex and then stop by Hollywood Video to pick up a classic with Rudolph Valentino. The early days of television were a recent enough memory that The Simpsonscould parody them. And perusing a record store, for those with the right knowledge, felt like entering a story that was still giddily in progress.
 
For those who, like me, devoured each edition of the Rolling Stone Record Guide, the story went roughly like this: At the dawn of the 20th century, recording technology came into being. America was a fledgling country divided into booming metropolitan cities and shadowy back roads, and as brittle 78 records began to circulate, voices from those shadows were preserved on wax. America won the war and its economy boomed. Freeways linked the small towns together. The Civil Rights Movement broke down cultural barriers. And then metropolis met small town, blues met country, and amplifiers birthed a shocking new movement. As Muddy Waters put it, “The blues had a baby and they named it rock and roll.” For the latter part of the 20th century, we were still browsing the baby pictures. It felt like journey of discovery to go to Tower Records, pick up a recording of the Rolling Stones covering a Robert Johnson classic, and then slap it on the counter with a box set containing Johnson’s original.
 
In 2024, how many people still thrill to an experience like that? Some, no doubt, but probably few of them are teenagers. As time passes, older times become condensed, and the average Justin Bieber fan would likely group Johnson and the Stones, however respectfully, together in the category of “old music.” The styles that first emanated from scratchy vinyl remain the roots, but the tree has grown far above them. The 20th century is going to sleep. Fine, let it. Enough horrible things happened between 1900 and 2000 -- not least the segregation that helped to birth the blues in the first place -- that we can set our sights on doing better. What remains, if we want them to, are the artifacts themselves. Taken out of the context from history, they can still thrill us aesthetically. I am thinking of the last few songs that I cued up on Alexa: “Stop! In the Name of Love" by the Supremes, “No Woman No Cry” by Bob Marley, “Smoky Places” by the Corsairs. They’re among the gifts that the last century gave us. It would be nice if that were all we could remember, but of course you can’t take the yin without the yang.
 
My poem this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder, “Blues Man,” is an elegy for that wonderful and awful century. This is both among my favorite poems and among those that were hardest to write. It started a couple of years into the millennium with the opening lines, which never changed: “One century (which time let go) / lives on stubbornly in this room.” That was the guiding concept, and I quickly sketched an elderly blues musician playing at a club for a young audience. Why was the musician still playing? What did the audience think of him? The answers to those questions varied through years of drafts. In the final version, the club resides in a college town, and the sparse crowd consists of young people who alternately empathize for the musician’s hard-luck songs (“You’re healed now”), feel bad about not being able to tip (“I’m out of change”), dance romantically to the beat, or sit up front and eagerly take notes on their idol. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards once did the same.
 
As for the blues man, he’s glad to be wanted. After another night of validation (“Their pens sustain him”), he heads to the bus for his next gig, noticing the images of his past embalmed around him: the bootleggers of the 1930s painted in the art gallery, Chicago now the subject of a film at the multiplex. Of course, the blues man has no name. He represents an idea, the notion of an era that refuses to die as long as it’s revered. As the twentysomething writer who began this poem years ago, I clearly revered it myself. By now, Tower Records is long gone, and CDs are fast joining vinyl in those antique shops. At the same time, the past endures, and more accessibly than ever; all it takes is a shout-out to Alexa or the punch of a few keys on YouTube to bring up Ma Rainey or Mississippi John Hurt again. Perhaps that's one blessing of this new wonderful and awful age. We let the old centuries sleep, but not die.

I don’t know if I have ever lived with a poem as much as I did with “City Night,” my piece that appears this week -- for the first time in a very long time -- in the Journal of Radical Wonder. Yes, I have taken my time on poems since then, and some have even gone years between first draft and completion. But that process is typically an on-and-off one, punctuated by returns to the writing desk and dozens of slashes and revisions. “City Night,” if I remember the early 2000s well enough, came out in a single draft, but it was a painstaking process in which every line or phrase peeled out when the time was right. If Jack Kerouac had gone at a similar speed to type On the Road, the scroll that he ran through his typewriter might have had permanent curvatures from having sat in place so long.
 
When I wrote “City Night,” I was 21 — an age when poets can be wildly inspired or embarrassingly foolish. I am not sure which category this poem falls in, but more on that in a moment. “City Night” started with an inspiration: One night, I was driving home in the rain from the Los Angeles Times, where I worked part-time during college, and found myself thinking of a young fellow staffer who had left a bit before I did. I hoped that she had made it home safely, then began imagining her journey in the past tense. (As it turned out, she did return alive to the Times the following day.) As journalists, we often live among police blotters and man-bites-dog stories, and the world seems full of horrors. So the opening lines heralded the miracle of my colleague’s return home: Somehow, another made it home tonight. / Somehow the connection wasn’t missed… That was all I had for a day or two, and then more lines came: …out in the dark street where engines hissed / and moaned, packed together close / in the frozen lamplight…
 
I added to the poem in the lecture halls at UCI, in my dorm room, probably at the Times and maybe even in my car. After a few lines, I thought of Robert Frost’s “After Apple-Picking,” which has uneven line lengths and no regular meter, but in which every line rhymes with another line somewhere in the poem — a merging of order and chaos. That fit the concept of a poem whose subject makes an orderly journey through a chaotic cityscape, so I had my format set. “City Night” ended up being 40 lines long (20 scattered rhyming couplets), and the title made its way into the sentences that end both stanzas. I was particularly proud of the final lines — Deliverance, in the city night, is just a door / with one strong chain — and when I dotted that last period on the poem (perhaps I was in line at the DMV or somewhere by then), I was convinced that it was the best poem I had ever written. Since I had only written about three legitimate poems by then, the competition was not intense.
 
But, as Frost wrote in another poem, nothing gold can stay. After I finished writing “City Night,” recited it proudly at a few UCI readings, and finally included it in Thief After Dark, my chapbook that came out from FarStarFire Press right before I graduated, I found my wonder diminishing. Part of me still felt that the poem was brilliant; part of me now wondered if it was pretentious and overwrought. …where doors draw back and payphones are forbidden / and men pray to women in bright-lit windows — by the time I finished graduate school, I was done writing lines like that. “City Night” didn’t appear in any of my subsequent books, not even the retrospective Tea and Subtitles in 2019. I stopped including it in my set lists at readings. Today, I certainly wouldn’t rank it as my best poem, or even in the top 20 or 30. And yet…
 
And yet I may not be the judge. Artists create art for others, and the audience ultimately decides whether something resonates or not. What the author considers profound, the reader may find dull or preachy; what the author fears is over-the-top may perfectly skirt the top for the reader. Just recently, I finished reading Moby-Dick in its entirety for the first time. I found it arch, self-indulgent and monotonous -- so perverse that I felt like Herman Melville was deliberately tormenting his readers. That novel has been hailed as a masterpiece by countless people for more than a century. By contrast, one of my favorite Bob Dylan recordings is "I'm Not There," whose lyrics consist of a series of fragmentary, slurred phrases, apparently since Dylan never finalized the words. The song makes no sense, but sets a haunting mood. There is no accounting for what will please an audience. Lawrence Ferlinghetti once described poets as "constantly risking absurdity." That is a risk that all artists take, and absurdity is not a terminal condition.

So absurdity has been risked, and "City Night" appears this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder. Perhaps it really is the tour de force that I imagined two decades ago, perhaps not. Enough time has passed that I don't care. The poem exists in finished form, and it now belongs to the world -- there for readers to ponder, forward, repost, or simply ignore. Like the woman who inspired it, it has reached its destination safely. My 21-year-old self would have been relieved.