Tom Yuill

I had the great fortune to be raised by parents who were great readers and great yarn spinners. I began to practice holding forth by explaining everything to my two younger sisters, making most of it up. Between them and my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles I was just always in the company of great talkers. When I was a little kid my Dad, who was a great lover of poetry, would come in the night before a big test or a big swim meet. His idea of a pep talk was to retell stories of the Red Cross Knight--replete with direct quotes from Spenser's poem--to get me focused on doing well the next day. And I had great teachers in college and graduate school. The study of literature and philosophy in the college classroom was a revelation to me, and of course now I earn my bread teaching, too. Something of that wonder I enjoyed in graduate school, and amid all that talking as a child, seems to come forth like song in those classrooms, and the students, with their own brilliances, memories, frustrations and curiosities, join in like members of an ad hoc band. Audiences at readings can be like that, too. The last poem in "Medicine Show" has these words about love: "And poetry just capers in the leafy thoughts above." That has to do with a happy moment between lovers. Perhaps the real gift poetry gives is that it's capering around us all the time.