A poet who celebrates the joy of verse

She supported his decision, saying, "Maybe you'll get more writing done for yourself." The couple lived off their credit cards for two years.

Eventually, though, Kennedy's writing provided the family with a steady income. To date he has penned 16 children's books, coedited three, and written seven books of poems for adults. He also edited poetry for The Paris Review and started, with Dorothy, a little magazine of poetry called Counter/Measures.

"I like poems where you don't really know whether to laugh or cry when you read them," he says. "I like what Auden said once, that poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings."

At the Concord Library, listeners did sense the complex emotions in his poetry.

"Kennedy knows how to use traditional poetic forms to give us both joyful and truthful observations about the human condition," says Glenn Mitchell, coordinator of the Friends of the Concord Library's poetry reading series. "His sketches of people and experiences combine playful irreverence with language full of sound and rhythm, and refreshing bites of irony."

Such comments might gratify the teacher who viewed himself as "a tour guide through the murky forest of poetry. Most college students have read [poetry] rather sporadically, spottily, and I was out to show them where the good stuff is. I'm the guy with the pointer and flashlight saying, 'Hey, look at this.' My goal was to make people see that poems can give us joy."

That's one reason Kennedy adds a dash of humor to his textbooks - "humor leavens life" - yet he encourages even young readers to understand how poems are constructed.

"The attitude that poetry should not be analyzed is prevalent among many who consider themselves experts on children's literature. But I suspected that kids like to look closely at things and figure out what makes them go. Without talking a poem to death, why couldn't you look closely and see what some of its elements are, what's going on in the language? Do you have metaphors, colorful figures of speech, musical sound effects?"

This approach has become popular in recent years. (The current US poet laureate, Ted Kooser, has both a book and a weekly newspaper column in which he encourages adults to do close reading.)

But Kennedy doesn't worry about being trendy. Nor does he agree with some of the ideas poets have about themselves.

"I get uneasy with people who say poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," he says. "If poets were the legislators of the world, the world would be even worse off. What poet can you think of that you'd like to vote for for president?"

Instead, he focuses on doing his work well, which at readings includes signing copies of his books, both the newer ones and dog-eared copies of "An Introduction to Poetry."

He also answers listeners' questions about everything from his choice of tie - green and white stripes in Concord - to his lively reading style. "A poetry reading, whether anybody likes it or not, is inevitably a theatrical experience," he says. "Why not face that fact and be the least boring performer you are able to?"

• Elizabeth Lund regularly reviews poetry for the Monitor.

How odd that verse that's song
Should so displease the young.
They are so serious.
They hate all artifice
As standing in the way
Of mind's insistent say.

But to my mind what counts
Is language that surmounts
The message it must bear,
Steps back without a care
And, stone blind, yields the day
To bloodstream's reckless play.

X.J. Kennedy, from "The Lords of Misrule"

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