INTRODUCTION

We live in a time of the professional writer. That is, the writer who has gone through extensive specialized training in an M.F.A program, possibly a Ph.D. program, in creative writing and views the path to becoming a poet as a career to be charted out and followed. Many bemoan this trend and claim that it leads to bland "workshopped" poetry (or "airbrushed poetry," as Louise Glück recently called it). But the current relationship of poetry and professionalization is a bit more complex. I believe that the more time a writer spends reading and studying the tradition of poetry the better. I believe also that technical competency acquired through study cannot make up for limited experience. And I believe ultimately, as Wallace Stevens says, that "life, not the artist, creates or reveals reality: time and experience in the poet, in the painter." This may be why a poet is typically considered "young" into his or her forties.

"Knowing all that precedes you is a lifelong task," Maurice Manning says in the interview in these pages. He is speaking of knowing something about literary tradition-the feeling that you've got a great granddaddy in Hopkins or an old uncle in Marvell. But his sense of figuring out where he fits in the lineage of what precedes him applies also to his own heritage and community, to the particulars of a life. His poetry reflects this dual concern with personal tradition and poetic tradition, with experience and training. In "A Bestiary," he wryly reads a similar concern with tradition into an overheard bit of conversation: "Clearly / the woman came from people who knew // their child should be acquainted with / the big ideas . . ." And he goes on to say: "if you don't think / you need to be raised up, I'm afraid, // it doesn't matter what you read . . ." Reading changes you. The poet who goes into an M.F.A. program comes out a completely different writer, that is, if the program is worth its salt. María Meléndez's sardonic poem "The So-Called Avant Gardist Gives a Reading for a So-Called Audience" likewise takes up the distinction between a lived tradition and one known only on the surface.

In his essay in this issue, Tony Hoagland touches on the dilemma between experience and training when he talks of the "truth/craft paradox." A poem must have a wound, he says, must be "dipped in-and stained by-experience." At the same time, he questions which is more important: what a poet knows, or how a poem reveals what the poet knows. Using unexpected examples, Hoagland explores how many of the poems we love subvert the truth by a crafty and entertaining means of getting to where they are going. "Poetry is entertaining for how it moves the truth around," he says, "and for how it moves around the truth." Yerra Sugarman's poem "We Did Not Come to Let Go" beautifully echoes Hoagland's insistence on experience. "O, to stitch one life together," the speaker craves, "to wrap it in tinfoil, / to remake it stainless." The point is that a stainless life, likewise a perfectly charted-out career, is neither attainable nor desirable for a poet.