Reading and writing poetry has been a long process of individuation, of finding out who I am and how I got here. It all began in Springfield, Massachusetts, when a bookstore clerk, himself a freshly published young poet, handed me Alan Dugan's Poems. The strangeness of the language, the dry humor, and the strong sense of individualism behind the poems captivated me. I have never lost my admiration for this witty voice. Though I could never equal Dugan's vivid irony, I have been trying for the last thirty-six years to generate a voice as sharp and self-defining as his.

This process of individuation is what is most radical about the art of poetry. Horace and Catullus, after two thousand years, still resonate as self-defined human beings. The ultimate political statement, in any era, is to speak for one's culture or one's self. Poetry may resist the collective identity of culture and society or it may be the means of constructing that identity. Virgil in the most dignified of epics recast the history of Rome as it passed from republic to empire, while at the same time Horace wrote candidly about running away in battle and Catullus exposed his and his friends' sexual adventures and embarrassments. Virgil identifies and defines himself through the history of his city-state, while Horace and Catullus construct themselves in personal lyrics that negotiate between the self and the larger culture.

In our contemporary world, the epic poem seems to have lost its ability to shape or define culture; but in the spirit of Catullus and Horace, poets continue to invent themselves in recastings of the brief lyric poem. The first person voice in the lyric both is and is not the poet. It may be the voice of the poet on his or her way to becoming more fully him or herself, or it may be a voice retreating from the oppression of selfhood or escaping into a new self. In my poems all of these voices occur, sometimes more than one voice in a single poem. I'm not always sure who is speaking, or why. But however difficult this issue of the speaker, I am not drawn to poetry that tries to mute or muffle or obscure the speaking voice, as Language Poetry seems to do. That strikes me as a particularly insidious form of oppression. We all know the speaker is a fiction, but it is a necessary one. Fiction, we must remember, is the most universal kind of truth. Without the speaking voice, we have no language but an empty system of signs. That is what passes for language in a totalitarian society. To be free to be ourselves, we need to inhabit our language, own it, impose ourselves on it. My imposition of myself on language has been the central project of my life.

"Inside Orion" is a poem about cosmology, but it's also about how cosmology is about us and our desire to place ourselves in larger schemes than we can easily comprehend. Here in rural New Hampshire the stars loom over me far larger and brighter than they did when I lived in the city, and it's difficult not to feel them as living presences. Yet I know it's my own awareness of them that gives them life, so the poem is an exploration of that one-way relationship, of which the telescope is the central metaphor.