I didn't realize how hard I'd been looking until a few months ago, when I spent a beautiful Sunday afternoon, late — that interval of slant light so prized by Henry James — in the penthouse of an elegant Washington apartment house. There was a party in honor of poet Anthony Hecht, who had published a new book of essays. But my attention was riveted on another poet, who'd brought with him a copy of his first book of poems, just published in England, the happy culmination of fifteen years' labor. I had known the poet during the whole of his apprenticeship, the long years of refinement and self-education that went into this book. He'd lived continuously in the same slum apartment. He hadn't had other careers, although he likes to cook and follows baseball.

I thought I understood better than anyone present what the book represented, but when I sat down with the new author, and we passed the book back and forth, stroking the watercolor on the cover, another poet soon joined us. He was just as eager to reverence the book, to riffle through the pages, to celebrate this rite of passage: he was a friend of the poet and had helped him with the book.

At the grand piano, someone was playing Thelonius Monk; the company of distinguished Washingtonians was alluring, but I never moved from my seat between the two poets. We talked for more than an hour about the new book in what can be described only as a mood of growing elation.

I am myself a writer, the eponymous prose-writer, and I remember receiving my first book in the mail and sitting down to unwrap it. I dedicated that book to the person who'd helped me, but I was alone when I got my first copy, and I know that the sensation was different from my poet friend's. Looking down at the printed pages, I saw only crude blocks of sentences, no different in appearance from the ones I'm typing now. The prose of my first book seemed so tight on the page that it was scarcely readable. And the stories seemed raw and alien. I received the book in the mail in 1985. To this day, I haven't re-read it.

I mention this only to begin to suggest why I've been looking at poets with such curiosity. How do they bond themselves to their work in the way that they do? How do they compose the work, plundering their own lives much as novelists do, and yet see it as something separate and floating free of self? Why does their work sometimes achieve the solid status of an object? These were just my first questions. The book party in Washington, and the holy ritual enacted around the new book, continued to tug at my mind.

What distinguishes literature from the disposable product is, we're told, its inexhaustibility. This is how literature (verse or story) attains the status of an art object. The reader can re-read it. And if, on the last as on the first reading, the text is both comprehensible and still fresh, the written work has achieved that inalienable status: it's more than a message. After fifteen years of labor, my friend's book had endured much more than a double or triple read: each of these poems, each phrase, each beat, each word had been poked and prodded, rendered utterly familiar, yet the poetry kept its allure intact, and not just for the author but also for his friend, as much as for me, who now reads it for the first time. The handling, physical and mental, had not exhausted its effects. How else to account for the fact that the book commanded our silent reverence? (I might compare it to the holding of the small bone of a martyr, if my analogy weren't forced by the number and grisliness of the medieval crucifixes hanging on the walls of that D.C. penthouse.)

The crucifix collector — who'd thrown the party for Anthony Hecht — is himself a poet. He showed us two poems from his master's thesis, which were inscribed and mounted in artist books — three-dimensional constructions of exquisite colored paper, each poem-book sheltered in its own enameled box. It was an enchanting moment, but one that left me wondering how it was that mere words — no matter how well measured, stacked, and rhymed — could stand up to such royal treatment.

Another way of putting it is this: How do poets come to believe in themselves and their art to this degree? That is the question posed by this prose writer. And since I've never had the nerve to put it to one point-blank, I've resorted to simple looking. ("Study it and get your fill," as one of Flannery O'Connor's characters eggs on another.) Shameless looking is a prerogative we fiction-writers allow ourselves. Our art is rarely housed in reliquaries, but we do feel we have the right, as do the cats, to look at kings.

So, feeling little guilt, I've been studying live poets for twenty years now, to see why the grass seems greener on their side. And the book party in Washington was just one scene of many, fraught with something (be it mystique or reality) that I can't fully decipher and don't feel invited to share. Which makes me wonder: Are we fiction-writers and poets — bundled like family members in the same creative-writing departments and published in the same little journals — really in the same business? People say that the key to our difference is readership: fiction is easier to read, less threatening, and so tends to draw both more readers and readers who aren't also writers. This difference is almost always laid to fiction's advantage. For lack of a wider audience, poets (must) write for each other. But, this "axiom" — or at least the deprecating tone in which it is typically asserted — could be wrongheaded. Writing for a clan of indoctrinated, alert, and sympathetic others might be an ideal condition for literary production. Closed-circuit distribution might make the work and its exfoliation less painful (given the awkward relation of both arts to the self) than the fiction-writer's way of writing into the populous void.

The pleasure and safety of the closed circuit might account for the fact that poets like to give readings a lot more than fiction-writers do, and get more out of them. In the old days, of course, this disparity was understandable. Fiction-writers didn't give readings at all (with the exception of occasions such as the bedridden Marcel Proust whispering interminable addenda to Robert de Montesquiou). Poets could, for brief periods before World War I and after World War II up to the late 1970s (and for a few stars into the early 1980s), make at least part of their living performing their work, and some became celebrities doing it. Poetry readings were exotic in the pre-MFA days, and writers from the top tier were lionized. There were vaudevillians (like Amy Lowell with her black cigars and Edith Sitwell with her turbans) and shock troops (Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso et al.), orators (Theodore Roethke, Vachel Lindsay, known as poetry's "Billy Sunday," Dylan Thomas), and folklorists (like Robert Frost). There were also politicos (like Robert Lowell and Robert Bly, although with different burdens). Writing in The New York Times in 1962, poet and translator Kenneth Rexroth depicts his own time as one when poets were "extremely well paid" and had "vast, unsuspected audiences" and when their doings were considered "hot copy." Why? Because their "popular image" was as "bearded savages who shoot themselves full of dope in public places (preferably on TV) and take off their clothes at fashionable soirees."

We are living now in a cooler (not to say cold) literary period. There are many, many more readings and plenty of listeners, if we tote up all the colleges with writing programs and visiting writers, but the occasions are decidedly less heroic.

And yet, even with such diminishing returns, poets still like giving readings. And poetry readings are — in this even more unbuttoned age — although less rare, still extremely odd. Declaiming lines of metered speech from a stage can't seem entirely natural to reader or audience. The best and most successful poetry readings remind me of classical guitar recitals, attended mostly by other guitarists or by those who know (1) how hard the thing is to play, (2) the extreme limits of the repertoire, (3) the distracting sound of fingers rubbing on wire-wrapped strings, and (4) the instrument's small if lovely voice. Guitar recitals — except for those featuring a handful of the top performers — are distinctly closed-circuit events.

What surprises me, though, is not that poets like reading to the public but that they themselves attend so many readings and can enjoy them. How can they afford to listen to and absorb the sound of so much new verse? (This prose writer confesses here that, for her, speech, music, any kind of patterned sound sticks to the brain like flypaper. A few bars of a pop song are enough to pollute the air for days. As she gets older, recorded music played more than once has to be byzantine in complexity to avert the danger of a fast-replicating virus.) But poets read and listen to one another's work with avidity, collecting periodicals and volumes, noting each fresh departure and advance. If Harold Bloom was right to detect neurosis in modern writers after Milton (or after Dante, because Dante was surely a similar case, pre-emptively packing a mass of ancient writings and characters into the Comedy), why are living poets, with this literary pile growing ever larger, not more allergic to one another's production? Where in their brains do they have room for this additional burden? Why are they not more fearful of catching — not just John Keats's contagious rhythms — but each other's?

I attended a reading recently, the shape and intensity of which bore the marks of a well-played exhibition game. This gave me an idea. Listening to the work of other poets could be the occasion for healthy sport, or practice, rather than an ordeal of mute reception. The reading in question was a two-poet event and the writers were well matched in skill and accomplishment, yet their way of playing was different enough: one was writing in the comic-surrealist mode launched a hundred years ago by the French avant-garde; the other was a partisan of the still-warm school of William Wordsworth. I watched their faces as they performed and then listened. The mask of polite attention was cracked from time to time by a visible flash of interest. The cause of the zetz seemed to be the sight of a pitfall the reader was facing in the shape of some hovering cliché or metrical pile-up, a figure of speech metastasizing out of control. The listener quickened as the reading poet began to roast. Could this trick be pulled off? (The thrill was sharpened, I'm sure, by the urge to solve the problem on the spot — and better — while the author labored toward the calculated result.) This pleasure (one athlete savoring another's grace — or not) made sense to me — for a while. But then I wondered how it could be that there are enough play possibilities in poetry, that one poet need never begrudge another a perfect shot? Or are familiarity and repetition (metaphoric trends, for instance, or rhythmic coincidence) less of a curse to poets than their corollary would be to a novelist?

The audience at this particular reading was in a very different mood from the poets. People sitting in the front rows and on the floor (all a good twenty-five to thirty years younger than the readers) didn't look like spectators at an athletic event. Each seemed alone and in a trance, absorbing the recited verse in a state of rapture. Some had their eyes closed. The other poets present had congregated in the middle of the hall and — although not as rapt — were twice as boisterous in their applause.

Altogether, the reading lasted about ninety minutes. Each poet recited a dozen longish works, taking time to make sure the air was clear, and his own kind of music solidly in our ears. Yet in spite of the quantity of material read, the poets seemed able to enter each of their works fully, as if lifting the cover of night and entering a dream. Not one poem left them indifferent. But the work didn't jolt or unnerve either, as it can during a fiction reading. There was a nice fit between poem and performance, vocal tone and verbal tone. The poems lay quiet — captured while still alive, perhaps, and screaming — but now safely killed and mounted.

When I refer to adverse reactions (the jolt to the nerves), I'm speaking, of course, of my own experiences on the reading stage. A fellow writer described what it was like to watch me perform. "When you find something in the work you don't like, you twitch or move in a particular way. I remember how you hold the pages away from you — it's not clear whether your eyes are bad, or you just don't want them near you. There's a kind of suspicion emanating from you. You seem very alone when you read, as though it's not a performance at all, but you're just there doing it, and you're surprised and baffled that anyone else is there with you. It's as though you're worried they'll break your spell."

This candid description seemed right from the inside, too. It's hard to create the "spell" of writing when you're reciting in front of a roomful of strangers. But poets seem capable not just of creating that spell but breaking it, too, whenever they feel like it, to judge from the custom they have of interjecting casual remarks, like hors d'oeuvres, between the poems. This on-again, off-again manner can't be easy to manage. Imagine a concert pianist telling a joke or an anecdote, say, about knick-knacks on his teacher's coffee table, and then launching into the Goldberg Variations. Then getting up and doing it again, before a Beethoven sonata. Demystification is not the effect musicians want. And they don't fight the formality of the concert setting, its costume and manners. In an essay about poetry readings, poet David Wojahn explains the role of these bursts of informality, advising readers to make their remarks "appear spontaneous... [so as to] help put an audience at ease." Their tone "should offer a counterpoint to the more special diction of the writer's poems." Such a built-in contrast is a curious idea, but why is it necessary? And where did it come from?

Reading a poem (or story) aloud demands concentration, even if the delivery ends up flat. And poets work hard at this aspect of reading, often changing their vocal character to help the audience hear the music inscripted in their lines. (One poet I've seen conducts himself with his own hand. Another screams his lines to make sure we don't mistake the moment for ordinary speech.) This histrionic effort makes some sense because the language of poetry — even at its most idiomatic — is never just talk, but the theatricality still shocks, and as Wojahn notes, it can distract from the meat of a poetry reading.

The first poetry reading I ever attended was held in the First Baptist Church in Providence, a lofty, clapboard structure, elegant and white. The poet, a celebrated author, read from the pulpit. All the pews were filled; the acoustics were excellent, and no anecdotal hors d'oeuvres were served or needed. (The Mayflower-y setting, perhaps, imposed its own chilly protocol.) By contrast, my second reading was by an author almost as famous, where the verse was accompanied by the musical sound of bourbon splashing freely into a jelly glass. No hors d'oeuvres here either, and none needed as the poetry's plainsong matched the poet's Brooklyn accent.

But most readings I've attended over the past twenty years fall into the Jekyll-and-Hyde category: now I'm a poet (Noli me tangere), and now I'm like you. A curious variation was the set of readings given by a then-young poet who, in his everyday life, was a cool customer, languid, hip, laconic to the point of mutism. When he spoke up in company, what came out was banal and unctuous; he never risked an idea, never caused so much as a ripple of controversy or tension. On the stage, he was a different animal. His poetic idiom is rich and vivid, syntactically intricate, and typically making some fierce emotional plea or protest. His stage manner was a match. The elocutionary style was formal, dramatic. The hors d'oeuvres were there, but no laughs or cheap irony. I heard this poet read half a dozen times; each reading was the same. Hieratic gestures matched lines and phrases in a way that seemed eternal. This poet was as much performer as writer, but the magic was all for the work, with none left over for life. One imagines a similar split dividing Wallace Stevens's workaday life in Hartford from the fanciful poetry, but the evidence of the letters suggests otherwise: there was poetic spillage onto collecting of objets d'art, wooing of Elsie, or even ordering of seeds for the garden. Rainer Maria Rilke is another such case where the poetry and the life seemed to be one continuous substance and surface, with all utterance approaching the condition of infallibility. But it might have been easier then, or perhaps the talent, in these two cases, made anything possible.

As a guitar student, I worked with a professional string quartet, all young men and recent graduates of Juilliard. Devoting their lives to classical music had had a strange effect on them. Every moment not spent practicing, rehearsing, marking scores was lavished on football, wrestling, kick the stone, and any other kind of roughhouse, always at the risk of injury to those heavily insured arms and hands. Music was their work, their calling, but it was also a curse whose dandyish effects had to be countered, leveraged, exorcised. Is this why so many poets love professional football?

But the point isn't to compare musicians and poets, or the old and famous with the new and untested, but to contrast fiction-writers and poets. Fiction readings tend to be tedious for performer and crowd. As writers, we try to keep ourselves out of the show, hoping that the appearance of egolessness will boost the illusion (of human-like characters, of streets and houses, of time passing) so that the story can take hold in the listener's mind.

Like poets, we want our work to sound natural, but we'd like the listener to hear — not our voice — but a character's or narrator's. Thus, the friendly hors d'oeuvres would get in the way. The knick-knacks we stared at the day we wrote the story are yet another proof that what we're reading isn't real at all but just something made up on a day when we felt bored. We have a harder time making the clean cut between ourselves up on the stage and the thing we want the audience to hear and believe.

A trickier problem is the intelligence of our audience. These individuals will be testing the authenticity of our characters' voices and the naturalness of events unfolding in time, against their own vast experience. And yet, if the things we tell are too natural, or too slow in the happening, why are we inflicting on them this boring slice of life? We're not actors, and we're also not offering something in an inherently pleasant form, with rhymes or beats to listen for.

Even when we meet its initial expectations, our audience remains skeptical. We have no props or special lighting, so our stories are just voice. What we have to sell as narrative artists is our understanding of human beings. But do we ever have enough, and is it acute enough; do we know more — or even as much — as the smartest person in our audience?

But there's something else. We're stuck with social life and committed to producing facsimiles of it, and poets seem to be able to elect out of it. We all have to exploit our personal histories, but poets exploit theirs in a less intellectually harrowing way. Personal experience (family life, love affairs) must beckon, in the minds of poets, like a palette of available colors or musical notes — materials they could almost choose to forego and work instead in clay, stone, or metal. They need words, of course, but Ezra Pound is not the only arbiter who ordained that poetic words be scrubbed clean, free of "emotional slither" and "as much like granite as can be." Using such "rocks," poets can appear to leave their own lives out of it, even when their own lives are all over it; whereas we fiction-writers are infamous cannibals. Our words are never as clean, they slither, and readers know where we got them.

That's one part of it: the form and its expectations. Another part involves the "study" of human nature, so central to the business of "the imitation of an action." Human speech, to a poet, must be akin to the sound of an untuned orchestra, something they can ignore; but to a fiction-writer, conversation is a desperate business. We need to understand "talk" in all its intellectual and psychological flavors; we need to be able to mimic it, separating out region, gender, age, different grades of class and education, to offer the reader an enriched but condensed (and natural-sounding) version of it. Here is the sound of one character, here another. The flow of conversation, its excess, its imprecision, its motley and changeable character — none of this need obsess poets. They pick their rhetorical range and play the changes. The phonetics, we're told, are as important as the semantics.

To illustrate my case, let me draw on some years spent talking, drinking, eating, and gallivanting with a distinguished poet. My friend is a ferocious reader. He has a sharp mind and a refined education in music and painting but little interest in the human psyche, his own or anybody else's. He likes to talk, and talks mostly about himself, but his self-absorption is not garden-variety navel-gazing. He discoursed once for a quarter of an hour about a tooth he thought he felt growing out of his back and what that novel feature could do for him. Nonetheless, whenever I asked him some nosy question, a detail of family life, love, or some such, he always punted. Once, by way of explanation, or because he thought I was being a little "thick" — he said that he felt he was all surface, that there was nothing inside him. I laughed at this absurdity, but another friend told me he meant it: "He's not Jamesian," she said. "He's not interested in anything Jamesian." Not surprisingly, his poems are depopulated and silent, except for the eerie declarations of a bodiless I. It's the work of a solitary consciousness surveying and addressing the universe and waiting for a reply. The poet's art works — because he also paints — are of a piece. The paintings I saw were all the same desolate views of an island floating in a solid-color ocean. Robert Louis Stevenson depicted these same islands; but true to his fictional calling, for Stevenson, even the rocks (like the vicious bunch called "The Merry Men") have personality and will. Some even have a sense of humor.

"During his late years of wandering," David Hilton, a translator of the Chinese poet Tu Fu, writes, "Tu's writing focused more and more on the solitary self cast against the elemental sweep of the universe." I was reading Tu Fu as I pondered these questions about poets. Tu Fu wandered (with his ever-growing family) in every direction over habitable China, in the eighth century when travel can't have been easy, even in years when revolution and invasion by barbarians weren't on the horizon. But true to his calling, Tu Fu kept his poetic thoughts clear of the personal, the daily, the familial, and fixed on the beyond. Scenery, mortality, solitude, time — all of these are in there, but little else.

The quality of detachment I'm groping to describe extends beyond the psychological to exclude other kinds of mentation. Poetic intelligence isn't asked to stretch itself beyond the needs of the writing desk. A woman poet who's written much beautiful verse about art and artists proved as resistant as the anti-Jamesian to answering questions about her material. When I asked her why it is that so many poets like to write about art — and not something else — she had no response. Was it a dumb question — like asking why novelists write about people? Or did it imply, ever so slightingly, that poets were forced to poach on other arts for their material?

Regardless, it had to be a familiar approach, and the answer — if not on the tip of the tongue — surely somewhat practiced, if only to ward off a busybody. Is it possible that poets don't ask themselves why they write about the things they do? Is it because, by special dispensation, they don't need to? Because it is a "centaur," as Pound said, what matters in poetry is that "the thinking, word-arranging, clarifying faculty must move and leap with the energizing, sentient, musical faculties." And if that's what counts, perhaps the content is nobody's damn business. I recall another poet bringing her baby to a meeting of graduate poets. She plunked the child down, smiled, and said, "I brought her here because she's my material." The students laughed, but she wasn't kidding.

For fiction-writers, this "material" is always under scrutiny from inside and outside. When my first book came out, a fellow writer admired how the knots of family life were delineated; then he paused, and wondered aloud why so few of us wrote about work, about the working life, implying that replication of family life was child's play. But perhaps he was also implying that since we novelists had begun sheltering in universities to solve the time-money equation, we'd lost all contact with the real world. For E. M. Forster, the problem pre-dates the invention of creative-writing departments and is built into the craft itself. Of what things does human life consist, he asks himself in his ingenious lectures of 1927, collected in Aspects of the Novel. He answers his question by assigning percentages to five activities: birth, food, sleep, love, and death. When he tallies up how much space novelists give each, he's not surprised to find a monstrous distortion of reality. Novels devote nearly all their pages and energies to love, with a little left over for dying. We novelists are attracted to love as a subject, not just because of its narrative potential, but because it gibes with the sexy mood we get ourselves into when we sit down to write.

Henry James — who knew Forster but died too early to be insulted by his craft lectures — troubles the waters in a different way, claiming that our professional pride rests on the ability to write about anything and anyone at any time. In "The Art of Fiction," James lavishes praise on an English novelist, a woman "of genius," who presents in her short story a perfect replica of French Protestant youth. How did she work up this alien subject? While traveling in Paris, she (Anne Thackeray, according to Leon Edel) "ascended a staircase, passed an open door where, in the household of a Pasteur, some of the young Protestants were seated at table round a finished meal." Since we can assume that the writer didn't stop and gape, the moment of critical exposure had to be brief.

To my knowledge, few novelists qualify as members of the lucky few who can write about anything, and the few who come to mind (Proust, Honoré de Balzac, Leo Tolstoy, Gustave Flaubert) were mostly French, worldly types, with rooms and incomes of their own. But even these novelistic grandees fall pitifully short of the scope of an Edward Gibbon or even a Jacob Burckhardt, to name just two "prose writers" of panoramic vision and millennial grasp. The rest are guilty as Forster charged. But the question is not really who (poets or fiction-writers) have the greater dominion over life's plenty but why fiction-writers are so disquieted by questions of subject — and poets aren't.

Fiction-writers, I think, feel responsible (and liable) for our choices, for what they say about the state of our minds, the range of our experience, and our right to practice. We commit at our peril a paragraph's worth of words, without complete command of the particulars of some world. In describing what it takes to write even a decent memoir, Virginia Woolf ranges over these particulars: "Consider what immense forces society brings to play upon each of us, how that society changes from decade to decade; and also from class to class; well, if we cannot analyze these invisible presences, we know very little of the subject of the memoir." William Carlos Williams, fiction-writer and poet, put it this way: "The form of prose is the accuracy of its subject matter — how best to expose the multiform phases of its material."

Or, putting it even more bluntly: "If prose is not accurately adjusted to the exposition of facts," he said, "it does not exist — Its form is that alone. To penetrate everywhere with enlightenment."

In his initial historic formulation, Roman Jakobson, the Pandora who unleashed structuralism (and progeny) onto literary studies, described the poetic function as lacking an objective reference, and then, twenty years later, in his second formulation, he corrected somewhat. In verse, he wrote, "the supremacy of poetic function over referential function does not obliterate the reference but makes it ambiguous."

Pound, as always, put it better when he said that great poems have "that passionate simplicity which is beyond the precision of the intellect." He coaches the acolyte in how best to thwart the intellect, by "filling his mind with the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language, so that the meaning of words may be less likely to divert his attention from the movement."

I interpret Pound and the linguist to be tempting the poet toward a different, and obviously more perverse, use of language: more attention should be paid to the connections between words (the signifying chain) and less to the ties between words and their meanings (the signified). Certainly, most poets would admit that their words refer outward, to something else, but their poetry-making profits, it would seem, from that little distance taken from the "reality" register — let's call it a fruitful state of unknowing in the hopes that this temporary release from meaning will heat the materials hotter, allow something in the words to "move and leap," as Pound put it, with the energy of music. Fiction-writers no doubt try out these linguistic recipes, but with more constraints. Prose is itself a form of straitjacket: sentences are made and deployed only with their logic-enforcing syntax. Poets use sentences, but not always; they have other, subtler ways of joining word to word, thought to thought.

If they have no duty to plumb the psyche or dish up slices of social life and are freer with their personal histories, if words can be set free momentarily from their meaning, if poets are answerable to no one for what they write about, then these might be reasons why they're more at ease with their finished work and can give it the royal treatment, either in packaging or in performance. To a prose-writer's eye, they seem to work with the coolness of a potter at the wheel. Since their material is not open to question or suspicion, personal data don't bear the sticky marks of self-exemplification and self-display. (There was, of course, that anxious moment in the 1960s when "confessional" poetry slithered on the scene, but the anguish seems to have passed, and coolness and distance re-established. If the material of a poem is the poet's life story, so be it: it did not have to be, and it is not the part that matters.)

What are words like to poets, and what is their word play like? In "Spelling," a short story by Alice Munro, the middle-aged character Rose is evaluating a nursing home as a place to deposit her ailing stepmother. The home has three floors. On the first are the most presentable residents, the ones playing games and rolling around in wheelchairs. The second floor contains the less mobile. It's on the third floor that Rose finds a shriveled crone, curled in a crib like a doll. Blind, helpless, and diapered, the old lady derives her day's pleasure spelling out words that she hears on the ward. Everyone is charmed by the energy and accuracy with which she belts out her letters. What, Rose wonders, are these words like in the old lady's head? "Did they carry their usual meanings, or any meaning at all? Were they like words in dreams or in the minds of young children, each one marvelous and distinct and alive as a new animal? This one limp and clear, like a jellyfish, that one hard and mean and secretive, like a horned snail. They could be austere and comical as top hats, or smooth and lively and flattering as ribbons."

Another fiction, Bruce Chatwin's Utz, offers a slightly different analogy for the play of words in a poet's head. Baron Von Utz, a fiendish collector, displays some pieces of his beloved porcelain on a glass table. The narrator asks Utz if he thinks his porcelains are alive.

"I do and I do not," is Utz's reply. "Porcelains die in the fire, and then they come alive again. The kiln, you must understand, is hell. The temperature for firing porcelain is 1,450 degrees centigrade."

In the same scene, toward the end of the novel, the baron describes how the porcelain figures are both in time and outside it, suggesting a mode by which poets transmute the details of their lives in such a way that action is simulated by something that is perfectly petrified.

    One by one, he [Utz] lifted the characters of the Commedia from the shelves, and placed them in the pool of light where they appeared to skate over the glass of the table, pivoting on their bases of gilded foam, as if they would forever go on laughing, whirling, improvising.
    Scaramouche would strum on his guitar.
    Brighella would liberate people's purses.
    The Captain would swagger childishly like all army officers.
    The doctor would kill his patient in order to rid him of his disease.
    The coils of spaghetti would be eternally poised above Pulchinella's nostrils.
    Pantaloon would gloat over his money bags.
    The inamorata, like all transvestites everywhere, would be mobbed on his way to the theater.
    Columbine would be endlessly in love with Harlequin "absolutely mad to trust him."
    And Harlequin... The Harlequin... the arch-improviser, the zany trickster, master of the volte-face... would forever strut in his variegated plumage, grin through his orange mask, tiptoe into bedrooms, sell nappies for the children of the Grand Eunuch, dance in the teeth of catastrophe.

A graduate student in my creative-writing department recently published a beautiful poem about the death of his dog. One of his teachers recommended it: it was, he said, that rarity, a perfect poem. A second teacher had groaned about how many versions of it he had seen over the year of grueling workshops but brightened to think how this ultimate live birth had been accomplished. Here, I felt, was grist for my mill: the multiple flawed trials, the hackneyed subject matter, all baked (and killed) in the hellfire of the poetic kiln, and, like Utz's porcelains, the poem born alive.

What I then recalled about my first poet, with the book fifteen years in gestation, was that there had been a book before this book, one with an heavy Latinate title, a book that had been killed to make room for this one. My sense, scanning the book's contents, was that not one poem from book zero had made it into the new one.

I mentioned this ghostly forerunner to my friend at the penthouse party. He laughed, but book zero was clearly not a catastrophe to him, a portent of statistical doom in the form of having to write two thousand or twenty thousand poems to arrive at a first book of just forty. It seemed to him evidence of an apprenticeship well served and well rewarded. Another writer, a scholar-poet, offered a fresh reading — not just for this mystery of creation but for all successful books of poetry. A poet, he said, works for a lifetime on technique: on meter and rhyme, on diction and syntax, on patterns of line and cadences of stanza. This is the habit and manner of work that a writing program can inculcate in its novices. Once or twice in a lifetime (at most, five or ten times, according to his Olympian count), the handsome verbal cage traps a live bird.

I found this idea congenial. It made sense of the cage-like boxes poets make for their work; it even answered to the satanic pride they feel in it. The bird comes on its own. The trapping of one is a matter beyond blame or praise.

Sitting side by side at that penthouse party, holding the book of cages, I understood finally why all felt so giddy.

The Yale Review
Yale University

Editor: J. D. McClatchy
Associate Editor: Susan Bianconi

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