It therefore follows that it is incumbent upon poets to hang out, play the music, join the choir, if they are to exercise their faculties. I didn’t. I’ve been asking myself lately if I abandoned verse because I am, by nature, more solitary than the poets around me. Maybe I am, but I’m not less playful than the others of my generation. I do note that my play preference is for matters of cognition, not music, and that my early life did leave me with a number of performance disabilities I’ve never much wanted to get over.

Still, I played ball with my fellow poets (literally and figuratively), I slept with some of them, and I fought them over ideas and sometimes over lovers. At the time I thought those were inevitable pursuits of youth and had nothing to do with poetry. And to be sure, today it is the conversation around poetry I miss more than I do the sex or the baseball. I’ve learned that poets carry friendships they form around language into old age, whereas nearly all other writers just become more solitary and grumpily competitive. I miss that playful part of writing, and not just out of nostalgia. I miss the choir practices. People who sing or play musical instruments keep their music nearby and in the open. People who work with ideas or characters in imagined landscapes to my sorrow keep them pinched, private and where the sun don’t shine nearly enough.

3. Substitutes? I guess I could be a nicer guy and a more social one, and I could phone up my fiction/documentary writer friends, ask them about what they’re working on. It’d be entertaining to visit them when I do this because I’d be able to judge their impersonations of iguanas. Or, I could admit that I’m really a poet, and see what that provokes. Now that I’ve tired of imposing my jowly face and white hair on the world, maybe I can now make something worthwhile from the larks flying overhead, and from the guns and the bones and the hamburger wrappers,

Of course I could also go the opposite direction: answer all my e-mail, join a political party again, or take culture jammers and activists more seriously. Or I could bite the big bullet and learn to play guitar, but didn't a guy named Leonard Cohen already do that en route to disappearing down a Zen rabbit hole? We’ll see.

Finally, there’s the question that this particular investigation begs to have me ask: Is writing–in any form that makes it a cognitive investigation of the universe, as opposed to an exploitation of a limited opportunity or market–worth doing even when society doesn’t recognize it as valuable? And if it is, what are the best ways to proceed in the Twenty-first Century?

I don’t have the answers to those questions, and I won’t pretend that I do. But I do understand better now than I did thirty years ago that poetry involves work, and that this is both its greatest pleasure and its ultimate reward. Work is the one element to poetic composition that seemed to get lost in the trenches of the Great War. This was a form of genius that didn’t involve much heavy labour. It merely hunkered down in the mud and waited the Reaper. What I didn’t understand adequately when I wrote the essay for Metcalf was that metaphor requires constructive practice more than it does rich human experience, which is about as useful and affective to it as second hand cigarette smoke. And I’m tempted here to urge the notion that the essence of being human is the constructive practice of metaphor, and the experience of it, particularly as it becomes a form of increasingly arcane behavior, is crucial to our survival as an intelligent species.

But today I do so on something less than idealistic terms and projectives. 
Recent theories that it was a cognitive leap in Neolithic homo sapiens that 
enabled them to see in metaphoric terms for the first time that led to the abrupt 
extermination of the Neanderthal populations with whom they’d lived in 
relative peace for thousands of years resonates through subsequent history in 
a very sobering way. At very least it suggests that metaphor may be a blade 
with two sharpened edges. Even so, the only possible remedy to metaphor’s 
misuse–whether it is by early homo sapiens, or Hitler, or today’s 
advertising technicians and/or scruffy street poets–is practice and work. 
Which I need to stop yapping about, and get down to once again.