Earlier this week, I got my contributor’s copies of Beloved on the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude from Holy Cow! Press.

My poem “Bear Butte Passage” was selected for the anthology a while back, and I had been looking forward to seeing it in print. What I was not prepared for, though, was seeing my name among such illustrious others: Billy Collins, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ted Kooser and Li-Young Lee, among other favorites.

As I read the book, I can’t help but think those same well-known poets also received their contributor’s copies this week. They soon may be reading my poem as I’m reading theirs.

I’m not one to judge the poetry of others too harshly. I know what I like, and I know when someone is wasting my time. And a capable poet who insists on complexity can waste as much of my time as an amateur who insists on vague sentimentality. For a long time, I have believed that poetry should be more accessible to be relevant to readers. Recently, I read an interview with a famous poet whose name escapes me. Instead of “accessible,” he preferred the term “hospitable.” And I think I can agree with that. Accessible could imply a dumbing down to satisfy certain tastes. Hospitable implies a welcome but not a compromise. You invite a guest into your home, but you don’t rearrange the furniture to please him.

For the most part, my influences are poets whose work seems like something attainable. I like to read a poem and think, “Hey, I can do that.”

I studied for a semester at South Dakota State University under the poet David Allan Evans, who later became South Dakota’s poet laureate. His poetry has been an inspiration to me because it is so straightforward, no pretense. His hospitable style motivated me because I knew I could write poems like his.

I’m also a longtime fan of Robert Bly (from whom this blog gets its name), Walt Whitman, Donald Hall, Ted Kooser, James Wright, Li Young Lee and Naomi Shihab Nye.

More recently, I’ve discovered the poetry of Brian Turner and Craig Arnold. Turner writes about his time as a soldier in Iraq, and Arnold’s rhymes and meters are so sly you hardly know they’re there.

I saw Arnold read at the South Dakota Festival of the Book in 2002 ( I think). At first, his performance made me want to quit writing, because his poems were rich and engaging in a way I knew I couldn’t approach.

Of course, I didn’t quit. But I did refocus on what I wanted my poems to become.

If I ever win the lottery, I’ll keep writing poems. In fact, I’d probably write more of them. Most lottery winners quit their jobs after they get their money, evidence that many people work because they have to – not because they love their work.

I like my work as a newspaper copy editor, but if it didn’t pay the bills, I wouldn’t do it. Poetry is the thing that I keep doing even in the absence of a living wage, or any wage, actually.

My career as a poet has progressed this year after many years of what seemed like futile toil. I had a chapbook published in February, and the quality of the journals accepting my poems for publication has jumped a notch or two.

And now, this blog: I don’t intend to post my own poems but to point out where good poetry is living these days, whether it’s on other blogs, in print journals or on the side of a bus that just drove by.

Now, off to check those lottery numbers …