Yesterday afternoon, as I was baking bread, the electric igniter in my gas oven burnt out. This has happened before and, as household pain-in-the-ass situations go, is not a big deal. Except for the fact that the man who used to repair such items has since murdered his family and then killed himself.

This leads me to darkness and to yesterday's comments and to my opening essay in LocusPoint. I love Maine and my town and my family. I laugh often and find many aspects of life amusing, touching, and joyous. I see beauty and am seduced by it. However, we all have roles and responsibilities as artists . . . and we do not all have the same role. Mine has evolved along a continuum that includes poets such as Shakespeare and Milton and Frost and Carruth and Bolton. This is not to say that I rank myself among them as a wielder of art. But all of these men have forced me to face the evil in this world, and in myself. They know there is darkness, and that love and good intentions do not always triumph. They recognize the glory in the hideous, the comedy in the pain, the elegy in the murder, the love in the anger, the sweetness in the polemic, the desire in the loneliness.

I have a friend whose son has become addicted to bath salts. Imagine: the child you once held in your arms is now hallucinating, terrified, and repeatedly threatening to hurt you.

I have a friend who tried to love the man who murdered her child and grandchildren. Here's the poem I wrote about the two of them . . . a year before he succeeded. It's a poem that will give me nightmares for the rest of my life.

The poets I invited to submit to LocusPoint are writers whom I have watched, over the years, work to deepen their (for lack of a better word) moral relationship to poetry. This does not implying moralizing but rather a groping for the truth beyond the truth, the complications, the confusions, the unanswerable. I chose six poets who do not stylistically write like I write, or live in the region where I live, or experience in everyday life what I experience. It was hard to narrow down this choice because Maine has many serious, accomplished, and striving poets . . . for instance, Kristen Lindquist, who writes exquisitely about birds; Weslea Sidon, who speaks with great pathos about old cars; David Moreau, so eloquent about the middle-aged, mentally disabled men who wander the aisles of Wal-Mart; Carol Willette Bachofner, who has undertaken a fascinating writing project about her old boyfriends. But LocusPoint is a project about place, so I needed to build geographical variety into my selection. This was difficult because most of the poets I've just mentioned live in the midcoast region of the state. Most, also, are women. I feel sad about losing their voices. I also feel sad about my conscious decision to eschew the voices of Maine's nationally prominent poets: Richard Foerster, Betsy Sholl, Wes McNair, and many others. If nothing else, the LocusPoint project has helped me see how interesting it would be to compile a real Maine anthology.

Nonetheless, I think there are lovely poems in this folio, and I am honored to have been the means of sharing them with you.