A student I haven’t seen for months stops by to say hello, 
	and she’s wearing a sundress, and when she gets up to leave, 
I see she has a tattoo on her shoulder, so I say, “Hold on 
	a sec, let me take a look,” and when I see
it says, “Poetry is not reflection; it is refraction,” I say, “I like that,” 

and she says, “You should. You said that in the first class 
	I took from you.” It’s times like this that I impress myself.
Not for long, though: the more interesting thing to think 
	about is not my excellence but the process whereby 
we turn our experiences into art that moves others, to do, for example,

what Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las did when she sang “Leader
	of the Pack,” recalling “I had enough pain in me, at the time, 
to pull off anything. And to get into it, and sound—believable.” 
	We believe you, Mary. Mainly because you’re so 
restrained when you sing that song, as though you’re not really bothered 

by the fact that the love of your life has just roared away 
	on his motorcycle only to be turned into a pile of hamburger 
somewhere out on Highway 30. Restraint: that’s the thing, 
	isn’t it? Discipline. Self-command. The more 
he wrote songs, the more Burt Bacharach’s music took odd turns,

became clipped and staccato, offbeat. “One-level records 
	always made me a little bit uncomfortable after a while,” 
he says. “They stayed at one intensity. It kind of beats you up, 
	you know? It’s like a smile. If you have a great 
smile, you use it quick, not all the time.” Burt Bacharach sounds 

like a smart guy. You have to trust the listener to pick up 
	on the little thing, to change and color it 
until it’s the biggest part of the song, even though it’s the smallest. 
	And the least true, maybe, in the factual sense. 
I don’t remember telling my class about reflection and refraction, 

but if I did, I was freeing the students from the absolute need 
	to reflect their world and telling them that
what they refracted was theirs to make, that you can disconnect 
	your image from reality. Mary Weiss says,
“The recording studio was the place where you could really release 

what you’re feeling without everybody looking at you.” And the poem 
	is the place where we poets do the same. Everybody 
listened to Mary Weiss—that song was number one 
	on the pop charts in 1964—and we poets, too, want 
to lose ourselves in our early poem drafts so we can write and rewrite 

and revise until the poem is so good that everybody loves it, 
	whether or not they actually end up doing so. When I ask 
my former student what other tattoos she has, she says
	that’s the only one, and when I say, “Wow, 
it means that much to you, huh?” she says no, it really hurt.