Yesterday afternoon I emailed the manuscript of my anthology to the publisher. At well over 500 pages long, this is the largest book I have ever created. Its dates span 850 B.C.E. to the present; the writers included come from all over the world; it features essays, poems, songs, letters, journal entries, interviews, and scripts. Of course, like any anthology, it is as limited as it is expansive. I was unable to forge a rights trail to several works I would have liked to reprint or find reliable or affordable translations of others. Authors would not respond to my requests; publishers charged absurd fees. On the other hand, a famous poet told me that I could reprint his essay if I sent him a bottle of good Scotch, and several people wrote beautiful pieces especially for this volume. It was exciting to collect such a compendium, to be in charge of deciding what would and would not make sense in this context, though of course I was always aware that my own predilections could not help but narrow its scope.

So now I just need to sit back and hope that people will read it. I still don't know if the book will be useful to anyone. Truly, the word useful is beginning to haunt me. What does it mean to a writer, a reader, an apprentice to the art? If this were a craft anthology, I might be able to invent an answer. But this is an anthology of "where poetry comes from." Inspiration is both quotidian and unexpected, and I haven't read a thing over the past year that's changed my mind about that.