I pray Congress never declares a “National Creative Nonfiction Month.” National month-hood seems, for the most part, public admission of an honorable, if forlorn, marginality, stuffy afternoon teas held for the aged maiden aunts of a country’s consciousness. It’s possible there is–unknown to me–a federally-recognized “National White Male History Month,” but a quick glance my daughter’s US history text suggests such a cause needs no help.

So, having committed a few poems in my writing life, I’m ambivalent about National Poetry Month. A thoughtful gesture, to be sure, but seventeen years after Dana Gioia’s “Can Poetry Matter?” appeared in The Atlantic, the celebrations–such as they are–seem far too earnest to be taken seriously. To my mind, most could use a hefty dose of self-deprecating wit, the sort often found in the work of Image’s poet-friends Scott Cairns, B. H. Fairchild, and Jeanine Hathaway, to mention a few.

Perhaps that’s why, during National Poetry Month, I find myself (once again) missing the witty leaven of the late Howard Nemerov, a secular Jew who remains one of my favorite explorers in the frontiers of art and faith. He would have chuckled with delight to hear someone so name him. “Poetry makes things happen,” he once quipped, “but rarely what the poet wants.”

Like his younger sister, photographer Diane Arbus, Nemerov attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, once described in The New York Review of Books as a “haven…for secular Jews who rejected the mysticism and rituals of Judaism, but accepted many of its ethical teachings.” He later graduated from Harvard and served in the Royal Canadian Air Force, reading Shakespeare in the belly of a bomber on long flights.

Nemerov’s work repeatedly probed the God-shaped hole in late modernity, sometimes philosophically, as in “The Blue Swallows,” sometimes with side-splitting humor, as in “Boom,” a riff on bourgeois religion (written well before white Americans dumped “religion” for that more upscale commodity, “spirituality”) which begins, “Here at the Vespasian-Carlton, it’s just one / religious activity after another….”

He found remnants of religious symbolism in odd places, and was comfortable citing scripture, chapter and verse, directly, or allusively.

I was fortunate to have Howard Nemerov as my teacher, quite late in his career but before mine had begun. He taught a “Language and Literature Seminar” at Washington University in Saint Louis to freshman undergraduates who had “tested out” of freshman comp on the high school AP English exam. We didn’t read much poetry, and he only once asked us to write verse for him (“To find,” he said, “any young talent here so I can thump it on the head before it gets to be a bother.”)

I understand he could be brutal in workshops, but I remember him as a kind, intelligent, and wonderfully funny man writer who would stop mid-sentence in a discussion of Herman Melville to gaze outside the window and say, “I think we’ve had enough of this; let’s go take a walk.” Unannounced guests would show up in the back of class, and Nemerov might or might not introduce them, depending on how urgent the material at hand was. I and some of my classmates took advantage of a break to introduce ourselves to one of those guests, Maxine Kumin, who wondered aloud, “You have no idea how lucky you are to be here, do you?.” Only now can I answer properly, “No, ma’am, we didn’t.”

A white bird’s-nest of hair and distinctive tremor declared him at a distance when he strolled on campus, though he rarely sought attention. I once walked by his office, which faced the ginko-lined path from the library to the quadrangle, while he stood silently at his open window, his arms folded on the sill. When I came into view, he broke his reverie to say, “Oh, hello, Brian. I’m working, you know. My wife doesn’t believe me when I tell her, but staring into space is work for me.”

I treasure most, though, his ready wit which, though sometimes sharp, usually turned its barbs back on himself. He had a great talent for gnomic poetry, and his in and out of class quips were of that sort: “A lot in poetry happens by accident,” “There’s no money in poetry, but there’s some money in writing about poetry. Trouble is, they don’t let you write about poetry until you write poems first,” and “Write what you know. That should leave a lot of free time.” He played with genres, including short dramatic works, and kept returning to forms which, he said, “Keep me from being stupider than the law allows.”

Though twice named Poet Laureate of the United States, he knew when he’d bitten off too much. Once, in an address on “Literary Plot,” that was clearly going awry, he pulled out a Sesame Street paperback, There’s a Monster at the End of This Book, read the whole thing in the voice of Grover, the Muppet, and said, “Any questions?” The academics were stunned, while at least one of his students had a hearty laugh.

So here it is, National Poetry Month, and I’m missing the man. When things get too serious for my taste, I click–just for fun, mind you–on the link to his recorded reading of “Long Distance,” wishing that I, like Miss Patricia Mitchell of Nacogdoches, Texas, could just pick up the phone and call him. That would be something to celebrate.