What an opportunity to be pompous. I have been fighting off lines that
herald "the dawn of a new millennium" and from issuing predictions that
"the next century promises to be . . .". We all know that the numbering
system is arbitrary, that centuries and millennia are human constructs
and carry only the meaning we invest them with, but yet, yet . . .
I cannot help but feel that this moment invites important statement,
a significant use of language. In other words it makes us wish we
were all poets. A dangerous wish. If the last 100 years have
taught us anything it is that the world is not a welcoming place for poets.
Death camps, alcoholism, suicide, madness: these words appear too often
in the lives of the poets of our century. So, instead of predictions I
offer a wish--a timid wish--that in the next century and the next
millennium the world will be a safer place for poets and that
they will be free to spread the word and the joys of language and
thought and feeling.
