I WANT TO TELL YOU why poetry is worth thinking about-from time to time. Not all the time. Sometimes it's a much better idea to think about other things.

Most of us have a short period of intense thinking about poetry, when we take a class in college, and then that's about it. And that's really all you need. One intense time, when you master your little heap of names-Andrew Marvell, Muriel Rukeyser, Christina Rossetti. Hardy, Auden, Bishop, Marvin Bell, Ted Hughes, John Hollander, Nicholas Christopher, Deborah Garrison, whoever, James Wright, Selima Hill, Troy Jollimore. Whoever they may be. Every so often you remember them. If you've memorized some poems, the poems will raise a glimmering finger in your memory once in a while, and that's very nice, as long as you keep it to yourself. Never recite. Please! If you recite, your listeners will look down and play with their cuticles. They will not like you. But sometimes if you quote just a phrase in passing, that can work. Like this: "As Selima Hill says: 'A really good fuck makes me feel like custard.' "

And after college there may be later phases as well, maybe one or two later phases where you suddenly get interested in poems again. I've had, I would say, four major phases in my life where I've been genuinely interested in poetry-interested in reading it, as opposed to writing it. Because writing it is a very different activity. Writing it, it's as if the word "poetry" is a thousand miles away. It's inapplicable. What I'm trying to do is make some new Rowland Emmett machine that doesn't have a name. I know of course that it's going to end up being called a poem, but "poem" is one of those bothersome technical terms. It's so difficult to pronounce. You either pronounce it "pome," or "poe-im" or "poe-em." It's not an English word, it's a Greek word that's had the end chopped off it, so it doesn't fit-it's got that diphthongy quality.

What I'm doing when I'm writing poetry is I'm trying to make a little side salad. Just the right amount of sprouts on the top, maybe a chickpea or two. No bacon. Maybe a slice of egg. It doesn't feel like writing at all. If you're writing, say, a book review or an essay, it's sequential. You type out some notes to figure out more or less what you're going to say. And then you find a place to start, which becomes the beginning, and you wander off in search of the end. But with a poem, you're in the middle, and then you're at the end, and then back at the beginning, all with your eyes. You're always looking at the same piece of paper. One single piece of paper is stretched out there in front of you, the lyric poem, as big as the salt flats in Utah, where fearless Craig Breedlove drove his jet-powered car at six hundred miles an hour. Remember him, back in the sixties? I loved his name, Breedlove.

Or maybe you don't use paper at all-maybe you're taking a walk after dinner and a few beers, like A. E. Housman, and you're writing it in your head, to the four-beat rhythm of your footsteps: "White in the moon the long road lies."

If it's a long poem, you're using paper, of course, but I don't count those long poems because I think most of them have very little that's good in them. They can all be cut down to a few green stalks of asparagus amid the roughage.

So that's writing poems. But I have had these certain few times in my life when I've been very interested in reading poetry. I used to read a big padded glove-leather edition of Tennyson on lunch break every day when I worked for a mutual fund. It was red, and for some reason it was padded like a Victorian settee. I think you were meant to give it as a present, maybe in the 1890s, to prove to your girlfriend that you were a thoughtful swain. Somebody had written in it "To Edie from Bart." It had the word Tennyson on the front in diagonally embossed script, and it was as heavy and soft as a catcher's mitt. You could thump it with your fist. Hurl it at me, Alfred Lord, baby. Smack me with that fastball of a "low large moon."

So I read that. And when I quit my job at the mutual fund I bought The New Yorker Book of Poems-the big yellow book-and I discovered Snodgrass, Kunitz, Nemerov, and Moss. Snodgrass, Kunitz, Nemerov, and Moss. Those were my four poets, for a while. And so I would read those guys. Mainly Moss. Moss was in his lovely self-effacing way a genius. You could hear notes of Wallace Stevens in him, and sometimes Bishop, and sometimes even Auden, but he was able to give it his own sad, affectionate jostle. Moss was the poetry editor of The New Yorker, and he was a modest man, so none of his own poems were actually in the big yellow anthology-but it was his book nonetheless. And I remember reading Snodgrass's poem about the lobster lifting its claw in the window and being tremendously excited. I had to keep peeking at it as I walked home. And even before that, in Paris, in the thirteenth arrondissement, where I lived in my junior year on the eleventh floor of a very tall, very flimsy apartment building, I read the poems in the Oscar Williams anthology, the one with the psychedelic raven on the cover. On Saturdays I'd wake up and read from the Oscar Williams anthology, and then I'd look for a long time at the eye of the psychedelic raven and listen to last night's wine bottles come hurtling down the garbage chute. There were notices next to every apartment's garbage chute saying "Please don't put wine bottles down the garbage chute," but people loved to do it. I'd hear the bottles come racketing down, and then silence. I could never hear them hit bottom, which was a little frustrating.

And then again recently. Last year I read a ton of poetry when I was working on my anthology. I mean a ton: way too much, probably. I own an alarming number of poetry books at this point, including maybe seventy-five anthologies, possibly more. I've been packing some of the books up that are piled in the hall. Taking them out to the first floor of the barn. That's one of my projects. Get them out of my life so that I can yearn for them again in a few years.

I WAS OUT WALKING my dog Smacko around eight in the evening and I heard shouts from Nanette's house. Nan was playing badminton with her son and Chuck, the handsome curly-haired man. A nice family unit, a healed wound. Nan waved at me, and I called out: "That looks like fun."

"You want to play?" said Nan.

I made a no-thanks gesture. But Nan cocked her head: You sure? And I said, "Well-okay." It was awkward because of the presence of the handsome curly-haired man, but so what? I can rise above that. Raymond, Nan's son, who seemed to have grown several inches, gave me a racket, and I plucked at it a few times like a ukelele and sang "I walk a lonely road." Then I started to play badminton. The problem wasn't so much that I was a fourth player, although there definitely were a lot of rackets swinging around. And the problem wasn't that I was a little rusty in my badmintonage and had to apologize when I swung and missed.

The problem was that my dog couldn't keep from barking and racing back and forth under the net. When the birdie landed at someone's feet, he was there to leap on it and take it gently in his mouth like a downed partridge. The next time someone hit it, you could see the droplets of dog saliva flinging off its plastic feathers.

Then at one point I reached down to pick up the birdie, and I discovered that I had a bloody nose. When I tried to play holding my nostril, it didn't work too well.

I excused myself and went away with my shame-eared dog and my bloody nose. Nan and her crew were nice about it, but I think were all a little relieved when I left.

IGOT A TART EMAIL from my editor, Gene. He wanted to know where the introduction was. Just because Roz has gone and left me doesn't mean I've escaped having to write it. The subject line of his email was "Whip Cracking."

So I went back up to the barn with my white plastic chair. I have a long table on the second floor with the manuscript of Only Rhyme on it. Gene has sent me the cover art. The catalog copy is already written, already published. It says "Paul Chowder's introduction locates rhyming poetry in its historical context and reawakens our sense of the fructifying limitlessness of traditional forms." No it doesn't. Fruck! It doesn't do anything because it doesn't exist.