Instructions for Arresting the Poets
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There has been an outbreakof disorderly languagein the heart of the city,and in order to restore order, we are ordering you to follow the following orders which are to apprehend the poets, whose names, addressesand numbers (naturallyand normally associatedwith personal identity)are as unavailable as ever, so you must go directly to riverbanks, zoos, theaters' back rows, courtrooms, the city jail,junkshops, and barstoolswhere you'll discover themlistening to noise,observing the invisible, pretending to manifest the ineffable or, worse, reading one word at a time outdoors or in classrooms,presuming to teach the youngto listen, as they do,not to what's obviouslyright, but the other right and left and the other wrong and to make up their own minds about what's left instead of the obvious. [End Page 526]
David Wagoner has published twenty books of poems, most recently After the Point of No Return, (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). He has also published ten novels, one of which, The Escape Artist, was made into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. He won the Ruth Lilly Prize in 1991, six yearly prizes from Poetry, two yearly prizes from Prairie Schooner, and the Arthur Rense Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2011. He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets for twenty-three years. He edited Poetry Northwest from 1966 to 2002, and he is professor emeritus of English at the University of Washington. He teaches at the low-residency MFA program of the Whidbey Island Writers Workshop.
