I first fell in love with William Stafford’s “Traveling through the Dark” when I read it in college. One of the most frequently taught and anthologized of his poems, I’m sure this poem was the first encounter with Stafford that thousands of other aspiring critics and poets had since its publication in 1962.

I may analyze poetry I read to pick up techniques and hone my craft, but the poems I love are frequently those with which I feel a more personal connection. (There are also hundreds of analyses of the poem online, so I won’t do so here.) Even though I liked “Traveling through the Dark” quite a lot, it didn’t become a favorite until I made that personal connection.

Reading You Must Revise Your Life just a few years ago, I learned that an experience on the same road between Portland and Tillamook that I’d traveled so many times had inspired Stafford to write the poem.

Rationally, I object to either the poet’s intent or biography influencing the value I place on a poem. It also seems downright silly that my “Oh, oh! I’ve been there!” reaction would influence my affection for a poem.

Nevertheless, the simple fact of shared experience with the poet makes William Stafford’s “Traveling through the Dark” one of my most beloved poems.

I took the Tube from Russell Square to Leicester Square, transferred to the Northern Line for one stop going south, and entered Trafalgar Square from Charing Cross.

Two nights earlier, I’d walked down in the dark, emerging between St. Martin-in-the-Fields and the National Gallery at dusk, tossed unfamiliar coins in the great glass box and raced through the echoing halls until the docents herded me out with the tourists plodding at the end of their day and the young artists squeezing in one last brushstroke.

Friday morning, the sun glared off the marble. I walked down Whitehall past the Houses of Parliament, where I lingered in the shade behind the Jewel Tower.

I’d allotted just an hour or two for Westminster Abbey. I stepped through door and picked up my audio guide, briefly considering the Japanese version, but allowed myself to be swayed toward English by the promise of “Oscar-winning actor Jeremy Irons” narrating the tour.

From number to number, I stepped clockwise through the hulking medieval architecture, past the gaudy tombs of the forgotten rich. I marveled at the twisted lid of King Henry V’s sarcophagus, lying as though discarded in the gloom behind the Coronation Chair.

Eventually, I turned into Poets’ Corner.

I hadn’t been inside a church in years, and the rest of Westminster Abbey certainly didn’t feel very ecclesiastical, despite the pause for prayer at noon. From a line of chairs facing away from the tombs, a little girl banged on the seat beside her and shouted at her brother, 「日本人はここに座るんだよ！」 I considered ascertaining what other unique cultural contrasts she’d been learning on her Grand Tour, but thought better of it.

Jeremy Irons trailed off in my headset, so I fumbled in my bag for my iPod. I looked up and Handel’s memorial caught my eye. “Surely He Hath Borne Our Griefs” from Messiah followed me as I jotted in my Moleskine the names of my favorite writers buried there — Thomas Hardy, Ben Jonson (buried upright), Charles Dickens, Geoffrey Chaucer (“Galfridus Chaucer”).

Turning around at Chaucer’s tomb, I looked down to see a black slab inscribed with the name THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT and the epitaph “The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.” I stood there and listened to Eliot’s own reading of “The Waste Land.” I must have looked odd, staring for 25 minutes at that slab, but on their rush through this less-than-spectacular section of the sprawling abbey, nobody else lingered long enough to notice.

Amid the swirl of tour groups and the silent tombs of my dead gods, the 30 minutes I spent in Poets’ Corner were the most numinous of my life.

Double-checking my facts as I write this now, fifteen months later, I’m instead embarrassed to find that the slab was merely a memorial. Eliot’s ashes are actually buried in East Coker, Somerset — more than a hundred miles west.

Sometimes, even false assumptions can lead to important moments that linger and inspire.

Most advertising is crap. Hearing poetry in place of “Your life has more than one dimension — so should your beer” is a welcome change.

• Bodies of Water
• Things I Learned on St. Margaret’s Bay

I’ll update the Poems page as other pieces are published.

Photo from Pierre J’s collection of French nuclear test photos taken in 1970

Back in the mid-90s, I toured the Hanford Site in eastern Washington State with a small college class. (In the contemporary national security climate, I’m surprised to learn that tours of the Hanford Site are still available from the Department of Energy.) Eight or nine of us piled into a van and drove around the site unrestricted, stopping a few hundred yards from the plutonium production reactors that the Manhattan Project used to create the core of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. The reactors themselves (in the photo below) had long since been retired and their cores “entombed.”

Photo of Hanford Site taken in 1960

Our professor drove us past the trenches in which sections of nuclear submarines were stored, awaiting disposal of their reactors. We stopped again in the abandoned town of Hanford, where the only structure left standing was the high school.

Finally, we arrived at the commercial power generation plant, Washington Nuclear Power Unit Number 2, where we were met by a PR man from the Department of Energy. He guided us through security checks and into the reactor building, where we were issued little badges to wear that measured our radiation exposure.

Eight stories up in an elevator, we emerged into a room overlooking the pool, control rods hanging over the water and the reactor itself immersed below.

We didn’t spend much time chatting or asking questions. We quickly turned around and stepped back into the elevator. Halfway down, the elevator stopped with a jerk.

For 20 minutes, we laughed at each other’s increasingly outlandish hypotheses about an impending catastrophe, as the PR man grew increasingly drenched in sweat. The elevator finally jolted back to life and we descended to the clinically white lobby, handed in our dosimeters, and headed back out into that unique light that seems to hang over Eastern Washington in the fall.

More than a decade later, I would write a poem that incorporated the entombed reactors, the abandoned town, and the submarines. The DOE PR man and his flop sweat didn’t make the cut.

I love that the Seattle Public Library stocks older BBC videos and DVDs. I also love Stephen Fry’s jacket.

• Cormac McCarthy: The Road
• Seamus Heaney: Electric Light
• Mary Oliver: Red Bird
• Frank Herbert: Heretics of Dune

• Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis
• The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
• 1984 by George Orwell
• Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
• When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone by Galway Kinnell
• Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
• Collected Poems, 1909-1962 by T.S. Eliot
• The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke
• Poems, 1965-1975 by Seamus Heaney
• I and Thou by Martin Buber
• The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo
• Writing the Australian Crawl by William Stafford
• Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson
• Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

I’m a little bit behind on my poetry journals, so I was very pleased to receive a link from Vito to an item featured in the current issue of Poetry Magazine.

The text on the left is a translation of a section from “The Great Order of the Universe” by Greek philosopher Democritus and the text on the right is from the 1959 LEGO brick patent by Godtfred Kirk Christiansen. The two texts are anagrams.

Now, my inner poet was rather disappointed that Christian Bök beat me to a LEGO-themed item in a major poetry journal. Sadly, my pair of poems published in Prairie Schooner last year were free of little plastic bricks. I take some consolation in the fact that Bök’s piece is in the “Flarf & Conceptual Writing” section. Perhaps I can write that Great LEGO Poem yet.

I’m glad I’m not the only LEGO fan who also reads Poetry, Vito.

• Matthew Arnold: The Portable Matthew Arnold
• Wendell Berry: The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry
• Robert Bly: Eating the Honey of Words
• Billy Collins: The Trouble with Poetry
• Emily Dickinson: Collected Poems
• Kilala Kitamoto: LEGO book museum Vol. 1
• W.S. Merwin: Selected Poems
• William Stafford: The Way It Is
• William Stafford: Writing the Australian Crawl
• David Wagoner: Dry Sun, Dry Wind (First Edition)