I celebrate youth, both the youth in my students, young and old, and the great unspent youth in myself. When I was growing up, my parents allowed me to run free of any apparent supervision. I literally leapt from one building to the next, dodged trains on the railway tracks, gathered tobacco from cigarette butts to smoke in my corncob pipe, roughhoused with friends, often leaving each other gleefully black and blue, ran naked in the summer rain before disapproving eyes, imagined myself a good guy in combat with all manner of monsters and evildoers, and everywhere I looked for a risk worth taking. In short, I came to know myself through play.
Of course, some of these adventures did not turn out well. In one instance, I opened a large gash in the back of my head from a tumbling fall. I was in hot pursuit of an outlaw and tried to leap over the railing of a porch, intending to land on my feet about 8 feet below. Where I took stitches still occasionally aches. I lost teeth, broke bones, and often came home crying. But I survived my own recklessness and I now see that such adventures have become the stuff of which my life has been and continues to be made. I will not speak here of my adolescent and young adult adventures, except to say that they took on a more consequential turn. I was told at various times in my life that I was unpatriotic, irreverent, and even mentally ill. And for all these judgments there were warnings, threats, and consequences. I now see it all as a happy adventure, though a few of the individual episodes could have cost me my life. There was one occasion as I was hitchhiking about that a man told me he would kill me unless I had sex with him. I refused and I survived, intact. That and other experiences taught me that there are no guarantees.
Now, as I look back and forward, I see that most, but not all, of my outward exploration has turned inward. I understand my writing of poetry as an inner version of that youthful play. I play at ideas and images and words, and there is a risk. I speak not here of the risk of ridicule, though that is real, but the risk of losing the very meaning of life -- because words and ideas by which we explore the meaning of our lives may turn out to be nonsense. And worse yet, unlivable.
Play reveals meaning. Some will see this as a frivolous idea. So let us begin our play with the idea of universal justice, that all men are created equal. Absolutely equal! Without qualification or reservation. No serious person would ever propose such a reckless idea, let alone try to live it. It lives first in the imagination of a boy at play. I remain on the lookout for a risk worth taking.