POETRY MATTERS: I heard the sleepy-voiced founder of PoetsAgainstTheWar.org on NPR this morning. I'm for the war (as much as you can be *for* a war), but I'm also pro-poetry, and I did love something he said: Poets should continue to write poetry because poems are powerful enough to change the way people think. I'm paraphrasing, but I think I'm doing him justice. And his words reminded me of my favorite poem of late, this from the late and legendary Kenneth Koch:

Paradiso
There is no way not to be excited
When what you have been disillusioned by raises its head
From its arms and seems to want to talk to you again.
You forget home and family
And set off on foot or in your automobile
And go to where you believe this form of reality
May dwell. Not finding it there, you refuse
Any further contact
Until you are back again trying to forget
The only thing that moved you (it seems) and gave what you forever will have
But in the form of disillusion.
Yet often, looking toward the horizon
There -- inimical to you? -- is that something you have never found
And that, without those who came before you, you could never have imagined.
How could you have thought there was one person who could make you
Happy and that happiness was not the uneven
Phenomenon you have known it to be? Why do you keep believing in this
Reality so dependent on the time allowed it
That is has less to do with you exile from the age you are
Than from everything else life promised that you could do?

- Kenneth Koch