Since my second child was born I spend more time at my workbench making a living than I do writing anything. The best way to describe my life as a poet is to tell you what I’m working on as a cabinetmaker. Currently I am rebuilding a 19th century American chest of drawers made of walnut and tulip poplar. It was probably built somewhere in the Shenandoah Valley after the Civil War. It has the mellow fiery glow of old walnut and warms the shop like the open door of a woodstove. Last week I carved two pine fingers on an evil looking cherub with a serpent’s tail that is actually a tall slender table. It looks like something a French Satanist would set his drink upon in order to recite Baudelaire more dramatically to his mirror. I have repaired benches and chairs and sideboards and cupboards and carvings and clocks. I have learned that inside old Mediterranean cupboards you can smell the salt of the ocean and a hint of lavender from centuries of cooks storing cured meats behind the little doors. Most of the upper drawers of dressers smell like lingerie. Once I found the page of a Prussian newspaper pressed behind the painting of a dog. I know how to make a skeleton key! When I was a teenager all of this was a bore.

When I was a teenager and just starting to read and write poetry, I remember standing at a window at the cabinet shop where I worked. The night before, I had read Walt Whitman out loud for the first time. It was a gray afternoon and I remember gazing at a little hay barn and a donkey sleeping on her feet. I knew then I didn’t want to spend my life standing at that window, so I went where all the poets were—to the university. I got two degrees and studied with some magnificent poets and immersed myself in the long story of it all, and then found myself—strangely enough—right back at that window. I work where I began twenty years ago (Nick Greer’s Antique Conservation) and am surrounded by people who can turn a bowl from a chunk of elm or cut a dovetail just as fine as you like. As fascinating as the work can be, it’s the people ultimately who keep me here. I have told my boss, one of my best friends, that if he decided long ago to clean carpets for a living then that is what I’d be doing today. I think that is true. I work with people I love and learn from them everyday. In fact, most of us have worked here for so long that our friendships feel more like family ties. What could be luckier? I count this shop as equal to poetry as a shaping force on my life.

And yet, I would love to work for a semester as a visiting writer somewhere. I miss the daily conversation of the classroom and the work of articulating things. The whole debate about the value of working in or out of academia seems too silly to take seriously. All the poets who taught me, some of whom I consider the very best poets alive, are full of genius and I am grateful to them beyond my ability to say so. Presently there are more poets than there are available teaching jobs, so many of us are finding careers outside of academia. I am not some magical blue-collar Caliban, and a poet who teaches is not some used-up, worn out, wingless Ariel. All the teachers I know work hard and most are among my favorite writers. We are all doing our best to pay our bills and to find time to read and write. I fight everyday for a scrap of time to think and I enjoy defying circumstance and what feels, some days, like the impossibility of ever writing a word. Isn’t this struggle common to most every writer on earth? It turns the blank page into a sanctuary and it turns writing into necessity. It turns the imagination. Mine is like a skeleton key and, so far, it opens everything.