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On the train back from New York, this great passage turned up in Ted Kooser's Poetry Home Repair Manual, in the "Writing for Others" chapter. It referenced a very short poem from the first chapter:
ARTICHOKE
O heart weighed down by so many wings
On with the passage:
THE POEM AS A HOUSEGUEST
A poem is an invited guest of its reader. As readers we open the door of the book or magazine, look into the face of the poem, and decide whether or to invite it into our lives. No poem has ever entered a reader's life without an invitation; no poem has the power to force the door open. No one is going to read your poem just because it's there. Because most of our early experience with poems happened in classrooms where we had to try to make sense of a poem, we've gotten the impression that people are going to sit still for a half hour sweating our the poems we write, trying to understand and enjoy them. Not so! In the real world, people know they don't have to understand the hidden meaning of your poem to pass eighth-grade English. They passed eighth-grade English years ago. If your poem doesn't grab them at once, they're turning the page.
Once a poem has been invited in, it can very quickly wear out its welcome. It may tire or offend or bore its hostess and be promptly dismissed. People who read poetry probably dismiss a couple dozen poems for every one they choose to be hospitable toward. The competition is heavy, and there are lots of poems out there waiting for their chance to be invited in. Many that earn invitations will fail to charm or engage their hosts, but a few will succeed, and one or two may be so perfectly suited that they will become a permanent part of their readers' lives, the way Joseph Hutchison's one-line poem describing an artichoke has become part of mine.
The poem I've just described as being successful may sound obsequious, fawning, too eager to please, but I don't mean to leave that impression. You needn't write in words of single syllables. You needn't fall on your knees before your imaginary reader. You needn't pander. You can write with difficulty and ambiguity if you envision readers who appreciate difficulty and ambiguity. However you see your imaginary reader, if you write with an abiding sense that someone is out there on the other end, someone generous enough to give ou a few minutes of their time, you'll make much better choices while you're writing.
I've always like this very useful passage from John Fowles, author of The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman, and other fine novels. It's from a review of William Trevor's book The News from Ireland: "I remember years ago watching the commercial folktale-tellers in a Cairo bazaar. All writers ought to have observed this ancient practice of oral narrative — all critics likewise. Getting the audience, I remarked, depended not at all on preaching and philosophizing but very much on baser tricks of the trade: in short, on pleasing, wooing, luring the listeners into the palm of one's hand."
