Editor’s note: In this week’s Poetry Corner, we feature an essay by poet Dan Gerber who is a novelist, short story writer and poet. His book, “A Primer on Parallel Lives” will be published this year by Copper Canyon Press. It is Gerber’s seventh book of poems. He lives in the Santa Ynez Valley, in California. 
The most common and certainly the most difficult question I might be asked by a stranger on an airplane is, “What is your work about?” It’s a conundrum for any artist. And I suspect the one single quality that may peg one as an artist—as opposed to, say, a craftsman—may be the artist’s inability to form a satisfactory answer. I could say it’s about the process of discovering what it’s about. And that would be honest. I could quote William Faulkner and say, “it’s about the human heart in conflict with itself.” And that would be honest too. What my poems are about is—and comes out of—a kind of knowledge not preconceived. It’s available only in the course of literary composition, a kind of wisdom that has to float like a piece of ice on its own melting, as Robert Frost said a poem must. So I probably won’t be able to tell you what any particular poem of mine is about in any words other than those in which it’s composed. Frost, again, famously responded to a question about what he meant by a particular poem, saying, “If I’d wanted you to know, I’d have told you in the poem.” On another such occasion he simply read the poem again. When someone tells me they wish they could read my poems but that they just don’t understand poetry, I hear, as a sub-text, them saying, “I just don’t know what it means,” as if poetry were a kind of riddle that only a select few can decipher. I think the difficulty may lie in the word, “understand,” when applied to a work of art. It seems to me a word no more germane to a poem than to a painting, a sculpture, a piano sonata or a novel. I will say that most of the poems I consider great, that have grown and deepened in me over the course of 30 or 40 years, were quite beyond me when I first encountered them. And yet they rang somehow inside me, like music heard for the first time. And I knew from the outset they were something I needed in my life, something I had to have. I recognized quite surely, they were necessary to the one who made them, and that they were necessary to me, though, on that first occasion, that may have been all I was able to take from them. “And so we are grasped by what we cannot grasp,” Rainer Maria Rilke said. “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” a poem by Frost, grasped me the first time my mother, or one of my older sisters, read it to me, but my appreciation of it has changed, deepened, saturated, over the years. The same can be said of “Leaves of Grass,” by Walt Whitman. I’ve never understood either of them in the sense that one may feel he’s come to understand a theory or an argument. How do we understand delight? I can’t say I understand a Mark Rothko painting, but often I can feel what is grave and constant in human suffering when I stand before it. I seem to grasp a Norman Rockwell painting on my first glimpse of it but am seldom drawn to encounter it again, and in fact may become enervated by repeated exposure. I may seem to be, and may, in fact, be a snob, but I believe as my old friend and teacher, George Oppen wrote, “… there are other levels / but there are no other levels of art.” I don’t think of an audience when I write, but if I did it would be someone very much like me. I’m deeply pleased when a neighbor, or a stranger, writes or tells me they have been moved by or delighted by my work—deeply pleased, but what really matters is the response of those I regard as my peers. I remember novelist Tom McGuane once saying “What really matters is the response of four or five friends. They’re the ones I had in mind when I wrote it.” William Keats said, “I never wrote a line with the least public thought. Everything I’ve written has been for the all-being, the principle of beauty, and the memory of great men.” And it occurs to me just now that what I write is for, and in response to, Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Willa Cather, John Keats, Federico Garcia Lorca, Rilke, Antonio Machado, Frost and so many others—those through whom what I am and do began to wake up in me. I write for those who taught me to see. There is work, like that of John Asbery or, at times, Vladimir Nabokov, that seldom moves or strikes a deep chord in me, but which I enjoy visiting for its juice, its pure verbal facility, its virtuosity. I may learn from or catch a little fire from them, though their art is not what I aspire to. What is bad art to me is banality, of any kind, or what Joseph Campbell called pornographic art—“… that which engenders desire or loathing for that which is depicted.” I’ve never understood Lorca, but I need him, just as I’ve never understood Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and I need him too. Now that I’ve come to a point in my life where I look back to what we commonly call middle-age, I think, finally, that what my work is about is this: Our working to discover what love is—in its least discriminating, least object-focused, and deepest sense—when the foundation stone of all we’ve spent our lives thinking of as our own has been worn away, something we might be given to understand, if only for a moment, in something like a poem.
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