In the Company of Poets

What finer education could there be than to spend your time in the company of poets? Is there another path of lived experience even half so much worth going through? After all, they are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world” (as Percy Bysshe Shelley would have it), and, as we are reminded, these darn poets are the music makers—why, they are in truth the actual dreamers of dreams, the men and women most likely to have thought through their subject (often at considerable length) and to thusly arrive at the perfect description, using just the right words, proffering a yarn with considerable merit (often involving love and death), and handing you a tale told not by an idiot but by a highly sensitive person attuned to the warp and weft of language, an expert in wordsmithery who may well be an intuitive empath of kindly demeanor and twinkling eye, a veritable bard driven by muses and a minstrel fomenting mirth, a storyteller who shan’t keep you long, but promises to make you think (almost without realizing it) and feel and laugh and cry—you know, the whole enchilada, just waiting for you to glimpse it and subsume the universe by partaking of a reading experience organized by a poet hard at work, and that work (by the Continental Congress and the Great Jehovah, we sometimes add) is the finest use of a mind that has ever been found. And the poet does this during the course of their entire life from infancy to oblivion. We might profitably start with the ancient Sumerians, and come up through Egypt and Greece, on to Rome and not forgetting China and Japan, and Native peoples in North and Central and South America as well as Africa and Siberia, because they all have their poets, and you can spend as much time with them as you like because while they were entirely different people from the sort of people we are, they were reliably human and told stories, and the best of them wrote poems for us to ponder all these centuries later, because we still have those ideas, still know tender feelings when a crying infant is soothed by gentle voices, and we still fall in love and overcome isolation and loneliness and fight titanic battles and conquer entire continents—or close enough. The poet will tell us how it comes out, or how it should have come out, or how we will make it come out because we spent our time in the company of poets and listened to them carefully with our eyes wide and our hearts open. "Tell me more!"