Letter to Editor (unedited), Poetry, September 2005 Dear Editor, I much appreciated Christina Pugh's essay, "No Experience Necessary" (June 2005), not only because it was the first mention of my name in Poetry magazine, but also because she got at exactly what I was making fun of when I wrote in the bio of my website, "He [Mark Yakich] divides his time between the bedroom and the kitchen." (It's funny because just the other day I was going to change that line, but then I got wrapped up in writing a short story (fiction, of all things!)) I have never liked flapjacket blurbs and what I like even less are those mini poet bios that say so-n-so divides his time between "San Francisco and Paris" or “New York and Mobile.” What's the implication? That the poet has two families or two lovers (one for the warm seasons, one for the cold); that he is an itinerant bohemian (crashing on the couches of other poet-friends); that he is rich and deserves the NEA grant in the next line of his bio; or, that since he regularly travels across great stretches of land, sea, and air he has important things to say in his poems. Experience is a wonderful thing. But the experience of a poem and the experience of "lived life" are not, and have never meant to be, the same wonderful thing. Writing poems should not be thought of as a process of translation, if only because that idea leads too many readers to wonder “Those were some pretty words about [love, mother, porcupines, etc.], but what really was the experience [antecedent, story] behind the poem?" The experience of a poem is to make the reader experience both language and life, but mostly language! In my first collection, there is a short poem that addresses what Pugh touched on at the end of her essay, the distinction between "experience" and "occasion": On Raisins They are much misunderstood. Like that old writer's truism: "Write what you know" -- well, you don't know very much. So you write about raisins. Faithless little fuck-ups, plucked, dried, smashed in a box. That feeling of being in the world, but not of the world. So what if berries fall from the hand as only berries do. At readings, some listeners find this poem humorous, even though I preface the poem by telling the audience that I am about to read the most serious poem in my book. Although that may sound like a deflection, a game on my part, it most assuredly is not. I did not intend to translate my lifelong experience with raisins into a poem, no matter how disgusted I have been as they've swelled up and attempted to become grapes again (re-hydrate) when milk was added to breakfast cereal. Mark Yakich Mt. Pleasant, Michigan