I started writing early, hit my stride in High School, wrote too much, got to college and wrote better.

Over the next decades, I didn’t stop.

Published here and there and there, I impressed my colleagues who put me on a pedestal because I was out in the world and they could find me there. They were more impressed with me than I was.

I was always a committed altruist. I knew it all along, but when I confronted myself to take a closer look, I knew it even more.

That’s why I chose teaching as a career when I fell into it. I opened my arms and heart to my students, we worked together in mutual agreement, to make the world better, to save it from itself.

Forty years teaching, little sleep, career highs, and how I found time for writing I’ll never know because teaching took over my life, and I had a family I loved more than anything.

I count among my greatest triumphs the chance to join the like-minded choir and add my voice as a Charter Member of Poets for Peace.

We couldn’t just join. We were vetted. We had to establish ourselves as credibly legitimate, sufficiently published, and we kicked into the coffers our little contribution, because, you know, poets generally don’t make enough to live on being poets, usually have to get a “real job.” Mine was teaching, but, you know, teaching. We teachers live on installment, paycheck to paycheck.

Poets feed on words, feel deeply, think deeply, have something to say and say it, and even influence prose. We are of like mind.

So when the chance came to pool our money and buy a full-page ad for national circulation, print a manifesto assembled by David Romtvedt (whom I know better now than I did then), we jumped at it. We poets of the time signed the Declaration.

Romtvedt argued that the reason we don’t have peace is because people can’t imagine how horrible war is. Our job is to get them to imagine it, which will make them reject it. Hence peace.

Poets for Peace. 28 December 1982.

I have it framed and hanging by the door as you enter the house.

We need to publish it again.

Four columns of names in fine print. Some you may know, like:

Kenneth Atchity
Margaret Atwood
Russell Banks
Robert Bly
Joseph Bruchac
John Cage
Hayden Carruth
Diane di Prima
Richard Eberhart
Gary Elder
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Robert Fitzgerald
Carolyn Forche
Brewster Ghiselin
Daniel Hoffman
David Ignatow
Maxine Hong Kingston
Ursula K. Le Guin
Denise Levertov
Philip Larkin
Kathleen Norris
Katha Pollitt
Gary Snyder
William Stafford
Gary Sterling
Brian Swann
John Tagliabue
Harold Witt
Curtis Zahn

To name a few.

I single out Ursula K. Le Guin because I had already decided she was my favorite and the best, wrote things I could read to my students, and wrote things for me.

I note early in the list Kenneth Atchity because we were both local and interacted.

I notice Curtis Zahn at the end of the list, whom I knew better, but I’ll deal with him separately.

And there I am in the fourth column. Gary Sterling. I have never been so proud.

Over the intervening years, Poets for Peace have sprung up everywhere. We need to join all our voices to make the mighty sound and shake the roots of war.

Peace is a lovely word. It’s high up in the handful of Beautiful Words to live by.

We should repeat it. We need it.