Poems, like most great art, are the art of telling the truth of life just as we live it. I learned this in the work of Joy Harjo, Mary Oliver, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, Ilya Kaminsky. Sometimes the truth can only be fully realized, in me and in the world, as a poem. It doesn't render as richly to describe a few minutes at the park by telling you that I sat in the grass at the park and enjoyed it. Instead, I describe how soft the spring grass was behind my hea