I seem to be in rarified company (as far as age goes) when it comes to poets; Seamus Heaney also turned soixante-dix this month.

 In this morning’s L.A. Times Tim Rutten wrote an op-ed piece about Heaney and the value of poetry:

In a recent interview, Heaney said he was often asked what the value of poetry was during times of economic recession. The answer, he explained, is that it is at just such moments of crisis that people realize that they do not live by economics alone. “If poetry and the arts can do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness,” Heaney said…..an effort to “fortify your inward side” [he] explained .can act as a kind of “immune system” against material difficulties.  

Garrison Keillor says much the same in the Introduction to his marvelous anthology of poetry, Good Poems for Hard Times:

Poetry is a necessity as simple as the need to be touched and similarly a need that is hard to enunciate. The intense vision and high spirits and moral grandeur are simply needed lest we drift through out days consumed by clothing options and hair styliing and whether to have the soup or the salad…The meaning of poetry is to give courage. A poem is not a puzzle that you the dutiful reader are obliged to solve.

(If you haven’t read much poetry, or any poetry, this book is a great place to start. Keillor’s Introduction is a mini course in poetry and why we should read it.)

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Perhaps it’s evident I’m not teaching or working on a book right now. When I’m not writing or teaching, I basically do three things: put up a post on this blog every other minute, read all the morning papers and clean closets.  

Next week I start teaching – to R's vast relief. (“Listen, don’t you want me to clean your closet?” I ask him every morning. “No! Don’t go near my closet.” He’s still mad that I gave away all his old Nehru jackets a couple of years ago. I’m now after his orange and mauve Hawaiian shirts.)