just let me hear some of that rock and roll music any old way you choose it it's got a back beat-you can't lose it any old way you use it it's got to be rock-roll music if you want to dance with me CHUCK BERRY Before I finished college, I knew I wanted to be a writer. At the very least, I knew I wanted to live in Paris in the 1920s, partake of the moveable feast, drink exotic drinks, and do it all so well, and, oh yes, by the way, I wanted to write brilliantly, effortlessly. My plan to accomplish this goal, at least as close as one could get in the last quarter of the twentieth century, was simple: win fame and fortune as musician, a singer-songwriter. The fame would create an instant market for my books, and the fortune would support both the writing and the absinthe. It was a good plan-the value of the marketing plan has been proven again and again, by celebrities of all stripes, though certainly not by me. The plan was fine-it just did not work. A big problem was that I had no idea how to execute Step One. Perhaps if I worked hard on my playing and singing, that would work. Perhaps if I wrote a lot of songs, songs as good as I could make them. Perhaps if I hated disco enough. Perhaps if I played for hours every day, took every gig I could find, played saloons for a drink, or a dollar, or nothing, perhaps if I did it night after night, perhaps if I played church basements, sidewalks, cafeterias, lobbies of buildings. Perhaps I could figure it all out by myself. Perhaps not. But I learned things, I learned so much, so much that I did not know I was learning, so much I did not know I needed to learn. Poetry is dying again. Or perhaps it is dead-I can never keep it straight. Poetry has been dying for decades. Just back in September John Barr, the investment banker and poet who is president of the deep-pockets Poetry Foundation, told us that-you guessed it-universities, with their blurry lit-crit and especially their MFA programs, universities killed poetry. Maybe he has a point with lit-crit. Poetry has been dying for centuries-it may be the longest death chronicled in history. In Dante's day, in Horace's, in Ovid's, in Sappho's, people were bemoaning that they don't make them like they used to. Vergil? Homer was better, though his work was derivative too. Just ask Milman Parry. It is a variety of things that kill poetry, according to the wise ones who see so clearly the death that the rest of us miss. Technology, poor morals, poor teaching, too much teaching, too much license-all have been blamed for the demise of this art form that just keeps going no matter what we say about it. We humans are one big input/output system: things go in, things come out. It's a constant process, which starts before we're born and carries on after we're gone, whatever, exactly, we decide makes up that 'we.' Or perhaps we can be better described as a system of systems. Take in air; put out air, maybe with a touch less oxygen, a little more carbon dioxide, the smell of garlic, the sweetness of a baby's breath. Water, milk, tea, whiskey in; pee out. Food in-you get the sequence. For almost all of us, almost all the time, we do not have to think about it much; it just happens. To its own rhythm, which sometimes we can influence, perhaps even control, for a while, in a way. But the rhythm, by and large, exists outside our control. Rhythm is a part of us, maybe even the heart of us, but we are a part of it, too, localized concentrations of matter and energy, which, physics tell us, are fundamentally vibrations, which are, fundamentally, rhythm. We are rhythm, baby. Let's do it. Robert Frost, arguably the most famous and most popular American poet of the twentieth century, if not history, likened free verse-verse written outside of set forms, verse written apart from strict meter or rhyme-to playing tennis with the net down. Which is not playing tennis at all, but rather playing something tennis-like. …