Dreaming in public, as Jon Frankel says in the comments box below. But as Arlo Guthrie once said: I'm not proud... or tired.

People are understandably skeptical of groupthink. Anyone who's ever taken a creative writing workshop has likely felt its effects. Consensus and inspiration don't usually share a bed, unless they literally do. Yet people do associate to mutual creative benefit. Someone offers an honest opinion when it's needed. Another someone provides encouragement. Another someone says, You ought to read Rebecca West or Barbara Guest or Lydia Davis. You'd like her, I can just tell. Another someone offers their couch for the night. Another someone takes your ideas seriously enough to argue with you about them.

The poets' union is already here, it's all around us. But I want something more. What is more? An invitation to want. Not settling.

Some people also object strenuously to the professionalization of poetry, which I can understand if by professionalization you mean the bourgeois assimilation of poetry, which brings with it a particularly pernicious and deadening brand of groupthink, the endpoint of which is the hegemony of genteel poetry. But what about poet as culture worker? Isn't "professional" in itself a middle-class marker meant to conceal the uncomfortable fact that doctors and lawyers don't actually own their means of production? Are still just highly skilled, more-or-less highly compensated workers? The objection to poet as worker is more logically a question of kind: if your work produces nothing that someone will buy, you are playing and not working. But if we believe in the dignity of labor then why not the dignity of poetry?

You make the real poem for yourself, with and for your ownmost body. But the finished poem is a gift. The capacity for giving, that's what I'd like to see enlarged. To others and oneself: negative capability. Men die miserably every day...

Yes, unions and co-ops squabble and bicker. That's what life sounds like. Life not organized for profit, but for life. The opposite of bad or malign organization is not no organization.

I'm not calling for some centralized Poet Authority. But when poets do gather, why not think in terms of mutual aid? What have you done for poetry—the poetry you care most about, the poetry that stirs you, the poetry that gets less attention than it deserves—lately? At the end of the day, with all his faults fully on view, I'd rather be Kennedy than Kruschev.

So look for the union label, every time.