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I like thinking of courage in two parts: heart (the French coeur) and
age. Coeur is the feeling that something must be done and that you,
and only you, are the one to do it. Your heart leaps into your
mouth—alerting you to the vast stores of emotional bullion in its
chambers. And now you can write a poem.
Courage makes heart into a poem by exercising its passion with song. The
song's beat is the most primitive human beings ever use: lub dub, lub dub.
Age is not what one always associates with poetry, but I have always
considered poetry to be the art one could practice till the day one
dies—provided a body can still hold a pen and a brain can access a few
memories and some basic vocabulary. The protean quality of poetry—to me
the same as the protean nature of courage—seems to increase with age,
even as the barricades we must climb (usually consisting of the rubble of our
failures) build up.
So, take your heart and take your years and write, that's my advice to anyone
who has the urge for words. And I wouldn't at all worry about whether what
you write will be any good. No one mustering courage can afford to worry about
success. Courage never does.
Even its beginning letter C summons up a harbor of energy from which to cast
off. But courage doesn't always sally forward. Sometimes, like the movement
of a planet, it goes retrograde, and appears to orbit backwards. That was the
energy I felt when I summoned the courage to re-read my first four books and
select poems to go with some new work called "The Land of the Shi." I
decided to call the new and selected poems Cornucopia. The word
cornucopia begins with the first letter of courage, the C that opens into the
rest of the word, as the end of a horn of plenty opens into its harvest. I
hoped to harvest what I had written from 1975 to 2002.
Some years ago, when Robert Creeley, a poet I so admire, began to select
poems from his lifelong output, he told me he practically felt as if it
meant he'd died. Oh no, I didn't want to collect my poems until I was at
least 105! But later, when my editor asked me to put exactly such a book
together, I was so taken by surprise that I forgot to feel deathly about
looking back. I felt alive and renewed by gathering old friends of poems and
reassembling them. They are the best family I've ever known. And they give me
courage.
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