I OFTEN SAY TO MY STUDENTS—AND IT IS STILL SO FUNNY AND strange to me to think that I am no longer a student but am a teacher myself, because in my mind, especially in relation to poetry, I will always be one—that without clarity, it is not possible to have true mystery. By clarity, I mean a sense in the reader that what is being said on the surface of the poem is not a scrim or a veil deliberately hiding some other hidden, inaccessible certainty. Clarity for me in poetry is a kind of generosity, a willingness to be together with the reader in the same place of uncertainty, striving for understanding. To give the impression that something important is happening but that the mere reader cannot, without some kind of special, esoteric knowledge, have access to it strikes me as deeply ungenerous, even cruel.