What is the job of a poet? I think about this a lot. Are we beholden to some greater

truth some moral high ground or is our job simply to write about what is going on in our lives

in our little squares of this earth? We aren't prophets certainly and most poets aren't any wiser than

any other human being. What we do really is simply look and listen and activate all the senses we

have access to and see if something happens. A lot of what we do is wait. Someone asked me recently

to see if they could follow along with a day in the life of me, me as a poet. I started to laugh

because what does that mean? It's not something that anyone would be interested in watching. It's

certainly not full of adventures or dramatic events. A day in the life of a poet looks very often

someone frowning at the computer screen or their journal. The poet Mark Strand once wrote,

I move to keep things whole. Well, I've frowned to keep words coming. So perhaps the job of a poet

is as slippery as the job of say a magpie. We look around for something shining and when we see it

we grab it. And if we don't see the shining thing, we just go about our day, doing the laundry,

paying our bills, making sure we can feed ourselves for another day. Our jobs are not obvious at all.

But we do name things, point things out. We are the ones to point to something and say what it is,

what it means, how it feels. Poets don't often have answers, but we do have language and language

keeps us going. We spend all day looking for the right word or recording the perfect localized

idiom that names a way of being in the world. Sometimes we are quiet and observing, but very often

we're the one asking what something is called. What's the name of that tree? What's the name of that

bird? We ask over and over until we are satisfied if only for a moment. Today's poem celebrates the

joy of being the one who asks what something is called, the one who speaks for the crowd.

A small moment by Cornelius Eighty. I walk into the bakery next door to my apartment. They are

about to pull some sort of toast with cheese from the oven. When I ask, what's that smell? I am being

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