An Anthology of Poems by USNH Students: Volume 3

Congratulations to all of the New Hampshire undergraduate and

graduate-level poets whose work is included in this year's anthology.

At UNH, we often have students in introductory poetry classes read

this anthology along with other classic and contemporary poets, so in

addition to congratulations, let me say something even more important:

thank you.

Thank you for knowing that the world needs poetry today. It needs new

ways of looking at old problems when the old rehearsed and received

stances and assumptions no longer seem to work. It needs your feeling,

your humor, your wit, and your sense of adventure. It needs the synthesis

of metaphor and simile. It needs the compressed meaning that images

convey, but only when they are run through the unique miracle of the

individual who lives and feels and remembers things in jumbled ways.

Virginia Wolf says that the world never asks for poems, but this anthology

shows that the world needs your poetry, just as the world needs more free

people of consciousness and compassion and its unlikely twin, humor,

needs their fresh eyes, needs their open ears, their impulse to build, to

make from a spirit of play, alertness, and discipline.

We also need poetry because poetry helps us remember. The techniques

and arcana of poetry, rhythm, rhyme, even the pauses, the caesuras, the

punctuation, and the withheld punctuation are all in the service of the

entertainment of memory. When we remember a poem, we remember to

feel, to live with our senses. We remember the rawness of feeling and the

relief and pleasure of play. And the voices of poets, being companionable,

being good company, remind us we are not alone. These are all reasons

for gratitude. Once again, thank you, poets and readers. And all readers

of poems become poets when they read. Thank you.

David Blair, M.F.A.

Lecturer of Poetry

Department of English, MFA Writing Program

The University of New Hampshire