At some point you have to set aside snobbery and what you think is culture and recognize that any random episode of Friends is probably better, more uplifting for the human spirit, than ninety-nine percent of the poetry or drama or fiction or history ever published. Think of that. Of course yes, Tolstoy and of course yes Keats and blah blah and yes indeed of course yes. But we're living in an age that has a tremendous richness of invention. And some of the most inventive people get no recognition at all. They get tons of money but no recognition as artists. Which is probably much healthier for them and better for their art.

I LOOKED INTO THE FRIDGE dipping my knees to ZZ Top while my dog Smacko slept on the floor. He's used to the TV, and he's used to loud music. It bothered him when he was a puppy, but he's smart and he knows somehow that the sounds aren't real. What bothers him now are ear mites and fleas.

Roz was very good at combing his undercarriage for fleas. He was my dog before she moved in, but even so she loved him to distraction. I would sit in a chair and she would sit on the floor with Smacko on his back next to her, and we would talk as she went hunting through his fur with her fingers. She'd find the fleas even when they were hiding in the fur just around his tiny turret. When she got one she would drop it in a glass of soapy water. Smack would narrow his eyes in sleepy pleasure at being groomed. I don't groom Smack nearly as much as Roz did, and I should. Everyone says this summer is a very bad one for fleas.

Louise Bogan said that Theodore Roethke made her "bloom like a Persian rosebush" during their long happy sex weekend together.

If I had a ponytail, which I don't, I'd cut it off with four slow scissorcuts and bury it in the garden with the rubber band still around it.

6

I WOKE UP THINKING a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.

For days I had a dissatisfied feeling. I couldn't focus. I was nervous about Switzerland. I'm going to be in a panel discussion there on "The Meters of Love," with Renee Parker Task, who's a hotshot among young formalists. Just the kind of thing I'm bad at. Being empaneled. All yesterday afternoon I thought about timed backups, and search results, and mermaids, and women wearing clothes, and women not wearing clothes, and I felt unlyrical. And then I got in bed and I read a short biography of Nathalia Crane in an old textbook, and I read a poem by Sara Teasdale, and I thought about turtles. And then, in the back of Mary Oliver's New and Selected Poems, Volume 1, I wrote, "Suddenly there is lots to read." I also wrote: "Mary Oliver is saving my life."

One thing I really like about books of poems is that you can open them anywhere and you're at a beginning. If I open a biography, or a memoir, or a novel, when I open it in the middle, which is what I usually do, I'm really in the middle. What I want is to be as much as possible at the beginning. And that's what poetry gives me. Many many beginnings. That feeling of setting forth.

Now. I want to make something clear. You may think we're in a new age, a modern or postmodern age, and yes, in a certain way we are. But as far as rhyme and anti-rhyme go, this is the third time around, or maybe the fourth. Thomas Campion, in 1602 or so, came out with an attack on the uncouthness of rhyme, which was very strange for him to do because he was one of the great lute-song writers of the day. He'd published two, maybe three books of airs. But no, suddenly rhyme and the normal meters were no good. They were vulgar, he said, they were unclassical, they forced a poet to go in directions he shouldn't go.

Everyone at court was buzzing about this strange tract of Campion's. And when Samuel Daniel read it it was as if his whole world was under siege, and he was deeply distressed. He said he felt that he must either "stand out to defend, or else be forced to forsake myself, and give over all." So he stood out to defend. Now remember this is more than four hundred years ago. All those years ago Samuel Daniel, writing in English, in words that you can easily read now-although some of them are spelled differently, and the sentences flow on in a way that our sentences don't-but Daniel says that for a poet who knows what he's up to, rhyme is no impediment. In fact, it helps him soar higher, he says. It "carries him, not out of his course, but as it were beyond his power to a farre happier flight." That's what rhyme does, if you're properly fitted for it.

Samuel Daniel was a court poet. He published a book of poems with a lovely, modest title. I think it's my favorite title of a book of poetry ever. The title is Certaine Small Poems Lately Printed. He was a man of some humility and grace. And he won his duel with Campion. Campion changed his mind and went back to rhyming. His neoclassical hexameters were pretty in a way, but people wanted to hear him sing.

And that's the single point I want to make today. People have been struggling over this idea that rhyme is artificial and unnatural for hundreds and hundreds of years. And meanwhile poem after poem gets written that people really want to listen to. And a lot of these poems rhyme. Imagine what would have happened if Campion had succeeded in his effort to fuss and scold rhyme out of existence and banish it from English poetry. Four hundred years of pretend Greek and Latin meters is what we would have had, instead of Marvell, and Dryden, and Cole Porter, and Christina Rossetti, and Gilbert and Sullivan, and Rogers and Hart, and Wendy Cope, and Auden, and John Lennon, and John Hiatt, and Irving Berlin, and Dr. Seuss, and Shel Silverstein, and Charles Causley, and Keats, and Paul Simon, and et cetera, and so on. Whole floors of libraries could be filled with the poems that we would not have had. Marilyn Monroe wouldn't have been able to sing

I've locked my heart

I'll keep my feelings there

I've stocked my heart

With icy frigid air

And think of it: you can put on the coolest, most spaced-out house trance music today-and it rhymes. "Got nervous when you looked my way, / But you knew all the words to say." That's a couplet from a trance tune by a group called iiO, in a remix by Armin Van Buuren, and nobody thinks tiptoe through the tulips when they're dancing to this, they just think, Yeah, the words work, they fit, they have that forward push of power. And they have that push because they rhyme. So it just continues. And nobody really stops to examine the need, the powerful endlessness and hunger of the need. Why? Why do we need things to rhyme so much?

WHY DO I, who can't make a couplet worth a roasted peanut these days, want poetry to do what I can't make it do? Mary Oliver is my favorite poet at the moment, and she almost never rhymes. W. S. Merwin's The Vixen is one of my favorite books of poems, and it doesn't rhyme. Not only does The Vixen not rhyme, not only does it not scan, it doesn't even capitalize or punctuate. And it's good. But I want these books to be in the minority. Why?

Well, of course, rhyme helps memory. But you can't allow yourself to get excited by that argument. Samuel Daniel used it, and Dryden used it, but it's not convincing. When I listen to something that rhymes well, I just like it. My memory for song lyrics isn't that strong, so the fact that the rhyme might help me remember the words is neither here nor there. First in importance is that the lines sound good. The sounding good comes before the utilitarian help of memorizability.

"Sugar, you make my soul complete. Rapture tastes so sweet." That's from the same trance tune I mentioned. It's sung by Nadia Ali, from Pakistan.

I CALLED ROZ and left a message asking if she'd like to come by and help me shampoo the dog. The flea shampoo is turquoise with sparkles and very thick. It's really a two-person job to put it on-one person to work in the suds and one person to hold Smacko's back and aim the shower sprayer. He keeps wanting to shake, spraying turquoise froth everywhere, and he will shake, unless one person keeps a steady, firm hand on the middle of his back.