Yesterday I took my sons to a funeral. Then I went grocery shopping. I shoveled out the barn. I made lentil soup and cheese wafers and listened to loud Bruce Springsteen songs and drank red wine and watched a ridiculous Jackie Chan movie. I read Our Mutual Friend. In between times I thought about being alive; and thought about how predictable and sentimental a reaction that is, after one has come home from a funeral; and thought also about how I had cried when the son of the woman who had died read a poem he had written for her. It was undoubtedly the first poem he'd ever written, and it was clumsy. Nonetheless, it did the work of poetry. It reached toward the terror of feeling, and it touched that terror, and it touched that feeling.

How is it that even bad poems can have such power? There is so much mystery to this art.