Yet all that sounds so sterile. It was personality, not linguistic bravado, that drew me to poetry as a teenager. When I was a teenager and discovered Meg Kearney’s “Creed,” her last poem in An Unkindness of Ravens, I had a shockwave experience: the voices of the Apostles’ Creed and Dr. King’s I Had A Dream and Ginsberg’s Howl all collided into the instant of that poem. An evolution of incantations had moved from their universal proclamations to Kearney’s individual ones. The sacrosanct became modestly personal. The poem begins by reclaiming idioms and clichés:

The appropriated “I believe” rejects moral fixity, starting with a dualistic statement (A therefore not B) that turns inclusive (B is okay too). While the Apostles’ Creed is a recitation of items handed down from tradition, Kearney’s “Creed” must begin anew, must revise the items. She demonstrates that our language-template of common little sayings is moribund, misguided, sometimes simply wrong. Here, language must be made personal to be made true. Here, belief is not subscription to an other but a process that is its own touchstone. Her poem is an act of self-creation, an apologia for herself and for her poetry. Apologia — from the Greek, from 1 Peter 3:15: “ready always to satisfy every one that asketh you a reason for the hope that is within…” The poem progresses from the nameable (“I believe ‘Give a Hoot, Don’t / Pollute,’ ‘Reading is Fundamental,’ ”) to the insistent unknown (“that ugly baby I keep / dreaming about — she lives inside me”) and finally to contextual particulars in which we share her scope of vision (“if you hold / your hand right here—touch me right / here…”).

Here, language must be made personal to be made true. Here, belief is not subscription to an other but a process that is its own touchstone.

I heard Kearney read this poem once, at the Cornelia Street Café in New York, a candlelit and curtained venue just a small flight of stairs below street level. I was welcomed from behind the bar: “Red or white?” The room was arranged as for a jazz show, the audience sitting at small round tables and corkscrewing to face the stage with drinks in hand. Each of the poets reading had the option to incorporate live saxophone improvisation from a woman who hung around stage right and never said a word. Her contribution was as a live interpreter: with her sax, she guessed and squeezed her breath of rhythms between the breath of the poet’s. The accident of harmony was a regular surprise.

When Kearney finished reading and was about to exit the stage, a number of us who were familiar with her work spontaneously yelled at her to please read “Creed,” which she rarely did. So she walked back to the podium. She began, “I believe the chicken before the egg,” her fingers spread to hold the book open. Then, she looked us each in the eye and recited the rest of the poem without glancing back down. As she neared the ending, her eyes closed. I realized halfway through that I knew much of it by heart as well. A woman at another table mouthed the words to the poem with one hand over her breast, like she was reciting a teary pledge of allegiance for the first time since grade school.

What makes a poem great and everlasting? The masses. The human touch.