I love that Brok O Bama!

"To the Best of Our Knowledge" on my transistor radio

Patricia Smith, whose Blood Dazzler is on the National

Book Award short list, Jay Parini who quoted Auden

like mad, and Australian poet, Les Murray, fathered by

a man with "an addiction to grief," who said, "I abhor

anything that demands human sacrifice." Last night,

in Chiloquin, Oregon, where we do, yes we do, celebrate

culture and poetry. Jay Parini, a poet, has written a

book called Why Poetry Matters and reminded me how

it does. Patricia Smith led with a poem about a girl

whose mother was known as a drug addict who asked

her to help her write a poem about her mother - dead -

that celebrated the person who sang while braiding

the girl's hair. The question Patricia Smith asked those

Miami-Dade County kids, was, who knows someone

who is dead. "I do," forty hands shot up, "I know a

dead person." Parents dead of AIDS and friends gone

to violence, and six year olds in need of voices, and

she realized that writing poetry is like having a second

throat, and that we poets, climbing to the lectern,

composing our poems, wield a very real power.