Sometimes we lay aside for a moment our training in the competitive criteria of literary fashion, academic establishment, and prestigious publishing houses-just as we pause in the helter-skelter of our lives to murmur, "Isn't that something!" When Roger Ebert and the late Gene Siskel performed their movie-review television show, they occasionally discussed "Guilty Pleasures," movies outside their usual standards but which, for various off-beat reasons, they just liked. Even Tim Duncan, when shoot-around is done and the game starts, just plays.

I do not mean to snipe at distinguished poetry, to carp about its elitist inaccessibility . . . blahblahblah. Nor do I mean to belittle the undistinguished, to bawl over the failure of American readership, the booboisie and the great unwashed . . . blahblahblah. (I reserve the right to regret that Maya Angelou is more widely read than Yusef Komunyakaa, or Jewel more than John Prine.)

Rather, I mean that reasonable, literate people may cherish accessible poetry that communicates what we are-or think we are-with clarity and beauty; and that reasonable, literate people may cherish challenging poetry that disrupts and reshapes what we are-or think we are.

This spring, the National Endowment for the Arts presented a major individual artist award to Greg Fraser, a friend and poet whom we are pleased to have published in Kennesaw Review (Winter 2005). A few weeks later, Ron Hendricks died, another friend, whose self-published book The Hatcheller I was pleased to review in KR (Fall 2002) and whose "Fraternals" I invited for this current issue. Greg's first book, Strange Pietà , is notably about his brother Jonathan. Ron's last narrative poem is in memoriam his brother. We might say that the comparison ends there-in similar familial subject matter, for one is a poet of national renown while the other will never gain that distinction.

However, at the risk of sounding sappy, I'll say that another comparison persists: their tough love of this rampant child we call poetry. For years, both men have worked with singular modesty as they learned from great artists, living and dead. Both have made Craft their architect and taskmaster, Observation and Insight their muses, and Language the foundation on which they have built.

A failure to grant Ron Hendricks's serious craft is a failure to appreciate our "base": people who read poems. Not to mention that his work has been publicly appreciated by poets as diverse-and discerning-as Turner Cassity, John Stone, and Cecilia Woloch. Knowing I could never sing as well as Fritz Wunderlich is no impediment to my joy at the tones of Nicolai Ghiaurov or Renée Fleming. In fact, I am certain that I am a better listener to classical singing for having studied and worked to be one myself. My last conversation with Ron Hendricks touched on our admiration for Wallace Stevens and James Dickey-poets whom I know Greg Fraser also admires. A failure to grant Greg Fraser the profundity of his humane sympathies-his heart-because of his poetic sophistication would be a monumental failure, indeed. A human failure. The man has made dangerous poems from the blood and passion of his own family, for God's sake.

During most of my life since I could read, with forty years of academic immersion in modern poetry, I have been reluctant to give up "Barbara Fritchie," "Abou ben Adam," or "How Do I Love Thee?" simply because I embraced Les Fleurs du Mal, Four Quartets , and Clarice Lispector. As I am offended by professors' ridiculing student mistakes, I am troubled by poetry-people's cheap disdain for the taste of Just Folks. Not because I disavow "higher" poetical criteria but because I reject the rejection of people who care about poetry as they know it. I am also offended by readers' negatively judging "serious" poetry by its demands, its difficulty on first reading. We're all learning, and we're all testing what we know against our experience.

In the business of reading, writing, analyzing, teaching, and publishing, we sometimes forget that poetry cuts a wide swath through our human population. When we say that an athlete, a dancer, the new Lamborghini, or an anemone on the Discovery Channel is "poetry in motion," we acknowledge that beautiful lines, graceful motion, and some ineffable correspondence with music are all in play. When people say they love poetry, they don't usually mean they are enthralled by the esoteric schemata of Jorie Graham, however tossed and poetical her hair may be. Nor do they mean that they have simply heard themselves talking back to themselves.

Usually, they mean that a language-thing has touched their lives: it's pretty simple.

Robert W. Hill