It is a commonplace of art that excellence lives not in some
grand concept but in the details. Poetry is no exception. Many a
poem creates in twenty or so lines a little world and for that
world to take shape so quickly and so fully, details must be pro-
vided that are not only convincing as knowledge about a time
and a place but also convincing emotionally. The poet tries to
choose among the myriad of details about any moment or place
or era or feeling those details that go to the heart of the matter.
The degree to which the simplest details--a name on a coffee
mug, the make of an automobile, a hair-do--can reverberate in a
poem is both startling and reassuring. Just as every picture tells a
story, every detail can speak about a life or many lives.

The American poet Ellen Bryant Voigt said it succinctly when she
wrote in her poem "The Last Class" that "A poem depends on its de-
tails." The details of a poem are witnesses to the truth of whatever ex-
perience the poem relates. If they feel genuine, if they have the ring
and bite and flavor of reality, we can believe the poem. A poem is a
simulacrum made out of words that exists on paper (or in our memo-
ries or on a computer screen) but it pulls all manner of actualities into
its created world. If there are no details, if the poem is a haze or a mush
of declarative feelings (e.g., "I love you so much. / You are my Truth. / I
feel good when I am with you." etc.) , then all the sincerity in the world
is not going to make the poem convincing. Details are the confluence
of observant intelligence, apt feeling, and thematic sense: Does a par-

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