Thanks so much, all of you who have posted poems and said wonderful things! I'm moved by all of it, precisely because I've never written exclusively for myself but always for some unseen other person I want inside the poem with me. The first experiences I had with poetry--in my grandmother's house, where poetry and music were always shared pleasures, not solitary occupations--taught me to think of it that way, and I think the inability to communicate with others in this country before learning English strengthened the need to invite others in, and to be invited in. To this day the poets I love most are those who open the door, even if the reader is surprised and not entirely at home once he's inside. I'm grateful to those of you who say you find it easy to walk into my poems and stand where I am: that's exactly, exactly what I want the language to do!
What happens after that, of course, is another story, and you're on your own once I have you where I want you. That's what happens with Frost, and one of the things I admire most about his poems. They open the door because the language is apparently just conversation, but then once you're in there he shows you things that sometimes make you wish you were outside again--in "Out, Out--" for instance--but you're better somehow for having been trapped in there. Emily Dickinson does that too, even though she's not really "conversational." She coaxes you in with conspiratorial wit, and then the roof falls in. But by then you're so hooked that you don't mind the roof.
The poetry I like least is the kind that shuts you out with thorny hedges of language so impenetrable that once you get in, no matter what you're offered, even if your eyes tell you it's caviar, you end up thinking, "Is this it? I got all scratched up and bloody for these little crackers with stuff on them?"
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