RHETA GRIMSLEY JOHNSON: Energy of innocence must drive poetry

OAK RIDGE, TN - The poets make the rest of us look bad. They always do.

Poets are the strong, silent types at workshops like this one. They are the real writers who say it succinctly and well, making the rest of us feel like gabby, fat relatives arriving late to the party in too many sequins.

We run around in our "Metaphors Be With You" T-shirts, admiring the foothill scenery and one another's best words, chattering away, wishing deep down that we, too, were the quieter poets. We prose writers use up more words, more oxygen.

In this country not even Robert Frost earned the rent writing poetry, so it takes a powerful passion and degree of innocence to proceed. Yet some do.

Poet Dana Wildsmith lives in a converted cotton barn in North Georgia, at the end of a road where careless folks often drop off unwanted dogs. She calls it her "dog farm," and the unwanted become cherished - and, lucky for them, characters in her poetry.

Dana has fabulously untamed hair, like a poet should, and a book called "Our Bodies Remember." That little volume she hands me keeps me up past a reasonable hour, drinking Coca-Colas and counting words, then counting again to make sure I counted right because that cannot be right.

How does she sum up young-married poverty that I recognize and remember in only 122 words? How does she know that a reference to a "hollow-core door" not only is musical but says it all? How, please tell me, does she do that?

And the title poem, well, listen to this part of it:

"Sealed and stamped, but now I'm not sure what I wrote/or didn't write, so I'm typing your letter over in blank air/because fingers remember where they've been sent and will walk/their previous walks when we let them. If we don't trip them up/with our thoughts, fingers can touch-tone phone numbers/our minds can't recall, and my grandmother's piano couldn't care less/if I have a brain, so long as my hands step lively."

I wish my own fingers remembered writing that.