In Disappearing Ink

Little known poets are lucky to have an audience on open mic nights. On arrival, we pencil our names at the bottom of a yellow pad. The featured poet reads first and then, time allowing, authors on the list head to the podium to pour out a poem and our hearts. Polite applause may follow.There's a flicker in time after such a reading, in the seconds it takes the poet to travel from the podium back to his or her seat, when...kazaam...it's as if the words of the poem vanish...are never heard again.A friend, Tracy Hart, compares it to Buddhists creating a Mandela. They may labor in shifts for weeks, moving grains of colored sand and craft magnificent art. But when finished, they wipe the art away as a metaphor that nothing man-made lasts.It's the reality that suggested the title: In Disappearing Ink and the subtitle, poems you can never find when you need them.But it also brings to mind a very human reality: the joy anyone who has ever written a poem knows - a pleasure arguably more immediate than writing in any other genre. Because so many try their hand at verse, I'm, betting you know how good it feels when you replace an imperfect with a perfect word; and that sense of pleasure when a jarring phrase is improved by shifting its position in a stanza. Here's to every poet's hours at the keyboard, to the stanzas, to the rhymes created, to the contentment of making, then sharing a poem.I Michael Grossman