Everyone knows that if you query poets about how their poems begin, the answer is always the same: a phrase, a line, a scrap of language, a rhythm, an image, something seen, heard, witnessed, or imagined. And the lesson is always the same, and young poets recognize this to be one of the most important lessons they can learn: if you have any idea for a poem, an exact grid of intent, you are on the wrong path, a dead-end alley, at the top of a cliff you haven’t even climbed.

This is a lesson that can only be learned by trial and error. I believe many fine poems begin with ideas, but if you tell too many faces this, or tell it too loudly, they will get the wrong idea. Now here is something really interesting (to me), something you can use at a standing-up-only party when everyone is tired of hearing there are one million three-thousand-two-hundred-ninety-five words used by the Esimo for snow.

This is what Ezra Pound learned from Ernest Fenollosa: Some languages are so constructed—English among them—that we each only really speak one sentence in our lifetime. That sentence begins with your first words, toddling around the kitchen, and ends with your last words right before you step into the limousine, or in a nursing home, the night-duty attendant vaguely on hand. Or, if you are blessed, they are heard by someone who knows you and loves you and will be sorry to hear the sentence end.

When I told Mr. Angel about the lifelong sentence, he said: “That’s a lot of semicolons!” he is absolutely right; the sentence would be unwieldy and awkward and resemble the novel of a savant, but the next time you use a semicolon (which, by the way, is the least-used mark of punctuation in all of poetry) you should stop and be thankful that there exists this little thing, invented by a human being—an Italian as a matter of fact—that allows us to go on and keep on connecting speech that for all apparent purposes is unrelated.

You might say a poem is a semicolon, a living semicolon, what connects the first line to the last, the act of keeping together that whose nature is to fly apart. Between the first and last lines there exists—a poem—and if it were not for the poem that intervenes, the first and last lines of a poem would not speak to each other. Would not speak to each other. Because the lines of a poem are speaking to each other, not you to them or they to you.

I will tell you what I miss: I miss watching a movie and at the end, huge scrolled words come on the screen and say: The End. I miss finishing a novel and there on the last page, at a discrete distance from the last words of the last sentence, are the dark letters spelling The End. It was its own thrill. I didn’t ignore them, I read them, even if only silently, with a deep sense of feeling: both the feeling of being replete, a feeling of satisfaction, and the feeling of loss, the sadness of having finished the book.

I have never, in my life, read a poem that ended with the words The End. Why is that, I wonder. I think perhaps the brevity of poems compared to novels makes one feel that there has been no great sustention of energy, no marathon worthy of pulling tape across the finish line. And then I found a poem of mine that I had carefully written by hand in the sixth grade, and at the bottom of the page, in India ink, beautifully apart from the rest of the text, were the words The End.

And I realized children very often denote the end because it is indeed a great achievement for them to have written anything, and they are completely unaware of the number of stories and poems that have already been written; they know some, of course, but have not yet found out the extent to which they are not the only persons residing on the planet. And so they sign their poems and stories like kings. Which is a wonderful thing.