I don’t go out in the evenings much, but yesterday a poet was speaking at the bookstore, so I ventured out. The talk was by Edward Hirsch, and I had signed up for it because I have a good record of enjoying hearing poets speak.

I have been to many poet talks, including ones by Robert Pinsky, Tony Hoagland, and Richard Wilbur, because I was English department chair in a prep school that hosted a speaker series.

I didn’t hear Norman Mailer speak when he came for the series, or Natasha Trethewey, because Mailer was before I was chair and Trethewey was after. I am glad I avoided Mailer; he looked as if he had been badly embalmed when he walked through the school’s dining hall, and I never liked his writing anyway. Seriously, he looked like an eroded lion statue, and as if he would explode in a puff of pungent dust when you lit a match in his vicinity.

The deal with this speaker series was that the department had a fancy early dinner at the headmaster’s house along with the people who had endowed the series, and then our distinguished visitor would go talk to a whole bunch of people, including high school students who got extra credit for attending, and put us all to sleep in the nice warm auditorium. Richard Wilbur put me right out, because he had a sonorous voice. Unfortunately I was in the third row at the time, so was probably difficult to overlook.

The department didn’t really want me at those talks, anyway, because I was a middle school teacher and they didn’t believe teaching middle school was intellectually challenging, but the poets liked me because I was actually interested in poetry. Pinsky in particular had to be redirected from talking to me, because the donors, and the distinguished elderly faculty member after whom the series was named, required his attention. Tony Hoagland and I talked about my favorite poet, Kay Ryan. He couldn’t understand why I liked her so much. Poets, like artists, have tastes and opinions that don’t necessarily follow the received directives of criticism. We are wayward like that.

The donors who came to the annual dinner had a son who went through my school, and whom I had taught when I was a science teacher (another reason why the English department resented my position). He was a nice enough boy. They liked being donors, though I’m not sure they ever read any poetry. Everyone was happy at those dinners, especially the delightful teacher the series was named after, who wore a bow tie, worked in his garden, and believed in red ink on his students’ papers. (He and I got along very well despite my fundamental disagreement with that pedagogical approach.)

I also once went to a Charles Simic reading at a national conference of English teachers. The reading was in a small room, and was sparsely attended, but it was absolutely my jam. Simic wore tinted glasses and spoke with a faint Serbian accent, even though he had lived in the US most of his life, and even though he wrote in English. His poems are surreal and dark. My favorite line of his is, “Smart chickens, rickety world” from the poem “Windy Evening,” a poem everyone should read because it blows the top of my head off every time I read it. Your mileage may vary.

On the way to Hirsch’s talk yesterday, I caught a 48 bus, which was sideswiped at an intersection by a too-hasty car (the car kept going, the bus driver stopped and called his dispatcher). We all got off and boarded another 48 bus that was following close behind, as if the transit company had planned it, so I arrived in time for the speaker.

However, the only available seats left were right in front, the seats that students and attendees of poetry talks avoid taking. I claimed one, then looked at the piles of books on the table, because having done such talks myself, I knew they are designed to sell books, so I shouldn’t be shy about it. Authors make very little money off the sales of their books, but every little bit helps.

When I looked at the titles, I knew I had encountered Hirsch’s books before; he is a prolific writer of both poetry and other books, and I had read his anthology of other people’s poems. Poetry is terribly individual, and what blows the top off someone else’s head often leaves me cold, so I didn’t like anything in the anthology. I have encountered some of Hirsch’s poetry, as well, but never copied any of it into my poetry journals where I keep the 200+ poems that speak to me. That’s okay. He’s still a good poet. I’ll probably find a poem of his that I like, eventually, if I keep reading it.*

The bookstore employee escorted Hirsch in; he was a tall man with a white guide cane, though he still seemed to be able to see a bit. He took a seat in a tall folding chair right in front of me, and launched into his talk. It was right up my alley, that talk, a warm combination of insights and personal history, plus quoting other people’s poems from memory (Gerard Manley Hopkins for instance!).

Hirsch started writing a sort of poetry when he was a high school football player, and then in college a teacher was encouraging but rude about his work, so he began to take it seriously. It’s funny how people value teachers being selectively rude to them. Students value red ink, too, even though it doesn’t teach them anything and they are sad when they see it. It’s a sort of initiation rite, where endurance of punishment makes you think you’re special.

Hirsch said that villanelles (one of my favorite forms) were mostly about loss, because of the repetitive format. So when he opened up for questions, I asked him, “If villanelles are mostly about loss, what are sonnets about?”

His face lit up. He was terribly glad I had asked that question, and he went into a thoughtful five-minute analysis of why sonnets are for lawyers and why sonnets come in cycles; they are, if I remember his thesis correctly, a systematic attempt to explain the unexplainable, which is why so often the last couplet so often begins its turn with a sort of “however,” and why people keep on writing sonnets about the same damn topics, over and over. I had the feeling of little bursts of enlightenment while he talked that is the sign of a good teacher. He seemed to be thoroughly enjoying himself, too.

After the talk, I picked up a couple of his books, because one should pay the price of admission, and because he had been charming. When I went up, he thanked me for my question again (I don’t know how well he can see, but he clearly knew it was me), and I told him I too had done talks like this, because I wrote science fiction. “I had three people at a Barnes & Noble, two of them family members and one a guy who just happened to wander in.”

“Did your family members heckle you?” he asked happily. I told him they had behaved themselves.

Then I removed myself so he could sign a book for the nice young man who had asked him how he dealt with writer’s block (his answer: it’s either a technical issue or an emotional issue, which is not an answer the young man wants). Many of the people who come to writer’s talks are writers themselves. I’m a writer, and when I experience writer’s block I either work on something else or I just keep writing anyway.

Hirsch’s writing on the flyleaf was impossible to make out. I don’t know if it’s because he’s increasingly blind or because, like most people, he gave up writing clearly. Yes, I taught cursive handwriting for a few years. It only sticks if you want it to, if you keep practising, and if you have good coordination.

The young man with writer’s block reminded me: I once had a young man at one of my talks (when I was still trying to do what my agent and my publisher suggested) come up and narrate to me the whole plot of the book he was writing. It was a superhero story. “What’s your protagonist’s weakness?” I asked finally, trying to stop him from going on, because the stream of talk was interminable.The young man, startled, told me that the protagonist didn’t have any weaknesses.

At which point I knew I wasn’t the right person for him to talk to.

I could be rude to my students when they made their main character invulnerable (or worse, made their main character relentlessly kill innocent bystanders, because my students watched action movies and played first-person shooter games), because we had a good relationship and because they trusted me. But I couldn’t be rude to a nice young man who had been kind enough to come to my talk, so I amiably suggested thinking up some kind of kryptonite for his superhero, said I had to go, and left with the family members who had come to my talk, as if they were hurrying me out, even though we had driven there separately.

My bus didn’t get sideswiped on the way home yesterday, and I have put the signed books on my bookshelf where I will get to them after I finish reading the book on notebooks, the book on invisibility, the book on colors, and the book about defunct countries. Hirsch was a very nice man and a good speaker, but I have priorities. I did, however, also buy his glossary of poetic terms on Kindle, and will dip into that whenever I feel like it because I can do what I want. I’m not department chair any more.

• edited to add, good heavens, I’m wrong. I loved his poem Fast Break, which is both elegy for a dead friend and a lovely description of basketball. My students liked it very much, but it was more a poem for my students than for me, so it didn’t make it into my collection.