I?ve always liked occasioned poetry: poems that find at least their initial engagement with a practical matter in the social world, something that historically calls for statement or song and therefore establishes its own mini-genre, its own decorums?ripe to be violated!  As my life continues in its crazy fishtailings, I?ve designed and performed a marriage ceremony, given a sort of eulogy, wanted to celebrate the birth of two friends? son, and given more than a couple best man?s toasts, all of which you may be forgiven for snorting at the thought of me doing.  Of course it?s ironic and absurd, but that is perhaps only the first lurch, the lurch against habituated sincerity that must happen to gain or at least approach, as corny as this sounds, an emotive truth as fresh as the moment that comes upon us greatly and never was before, even though it has occurred again and again throughout time.  I do.  Whammo.  Irony can?t be gone around, it can only be gone through.  So when some students asked me to give a little speech at their graduation, a rather motley event considering it was from an MFA program, I was touched and felt that mixture of compulsion and obligation that I often feel when trying to write poems: compulsion to follow what-the-hell-ever impulse presents itself while being paradoxically obliged to a clear imperative, a clear situation in the human dilemma?something that usually has to be discovered except in occasioned poems.  Maybe that?s why I like occasioned poetry so much: how immediately it sets up an energy field between the poles of improvisation and law, abandonment and purposefulness.  The expected can cavort with the surprising; what?s required with the unpredictable whim of singing.  I think that?s where truth is, not just in the dictum but also the living tongue, the goofy fun of writing as well as the deep, sometimes dire imperatives.  It?s always one thing and the other.  I didn?t actually do the speech, but I gave my students ?Commencement Address.?