Resolutions are too easy to ignore. Make your 2008 manifesto now.

Mine is still taking shape, but one thing I've decided is that I will bring more poetry into my life in the coming year. Not only will I read more poetry but I will also support it with dollars and applause.

I just bought Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2005.

Ambition

Having reached the beginning, starting toward
a new ignorance. Places to become,
secrets to live in, sins to achieve.
Maybe South America, perhaps a new woman,
another language to not understand.
Like setting out on a raft over an ocean
of life already well lived.
A two-story failed hotel in the tropics,
hot silence of noon with the sun
straying through the shutters.
Sitting with his poems at a small table,
everybody asleep. Thinking with pleasure,
trailing his hand in the river he will
turn into.