My mother served early as my intellectual press agent, inflating my A's to A pluses, adjusting my IQ from smart enough to borderline genius. She coaxed me to sing along with the radio and then applauded wildly when I won her a wrist watch and a record player on the radio show "Live Like a Millionaire." My father worked nights and came home only occasionally to argue. His dreams of worldly success bordered on the delusional -- his idea of preeminence included being photographed with Eddie Fisher and Eddie's white Mercedes convertible. My parents wanted to believe I was so brilliant, talented, and well-behaved, that if I had any sense of reality at all, I could not help but fall short of their expectations. Their dreams for me always exceeded my accomplishments, so it's no wonder I grew up believing failure unbearable and inevitable. Even now I can't bear to imagine the expression on my mother's face when, as a six year-old, I came in second on the radio show's weekly contest.

I know I offer a familiar picture of an upwardly mobile second-generation Jewish family, albeit an unhappy one. Perhaps most of them were unhappy. It certainly seemed so by the shouts in my various neighborhoods. My parents' discontent often sent me to my room, where I could close the door and read and daydream. Where I could interview myself as a famous baseball player, where I could build neighborhoods out of the cardboard backings in my father's freshly laundered shirts. Where I could sing and dance and mouth the words to popular songs from the Fifties. Where, even if we moved every two years to better and better neighborhoods, I'd have a friend or two residing in my imagination. So it's no wonder, like many deprived and grandiose children, I've always wondered, Why can't I do everything? Why can't I have everything?

Perhaps you can picture the slightly lonely boy wearing galoshes a few sizes too big (he'd grow into them), carrying a briefcase to school in the fifth grade. Rightfully, older boys would periodically stuff the briefcase with snow, letting me know I was too young to labor, that the boy who raised his hand once too often was perhaps too anxious to please. Slightly melancholy, but not terirbly unhappy. There's no need to feel sorry for me. After all, my fears and worries made me functional, and it's quite clear that children whose parents address them directly as inadequate, suffer much more. My parents had undoubtedly tried their best at a vocation for which (married at twenty, primarily to escape their own oppressive parents) they were both clearly ill-suited. And, after all, I had some inner resources: I found a small circle of "smart kids" who went to the library after school and played punchball till dark. Of course it's true that I always had the nagging feeling, the shameful feeling, that shorn of all the facts and figures I calculated for my parents' pleasure -- Mickey Mantle hit .353 in 1956, Oslo's the capitol of Norway, bananas were produced in Nicaragua -- I was teribly ordinary. And being ordinary is not material for an American success story.

Once you dig a little deeper, of course, (and this is why writing provides a wonderful kind of archeology), you realize that though we more likely fear and hope for the same things, nobody is ordinary, So my uncle Artie, who played the trombone for Jimmy Dorsey, was mad, and grandma Eva, straight off the boat from Minsk, served as a guard in a woman's prison after her husband had been run over by drunken teen-agers. Grandpa Henry, who died before I was born, was the chief projectionist in the Loew's theater in Brooklyn. And my parents, before they were parents, had different dreams: my mother had been a ballet dancer -- to this day I don't know the seriousness of her commitment -- and my father had been a concert pianist. My mother gave it up, (gladly, she said, but I knew better) to become a mother, and my father lost the ability to interpret the music when, during his adolescence, his father died. By the time I was born, these commitments where ghostly, absences really. I saw my mother's bronzed ballet shoes, I heard my father occasionally tackle a Chopin nocturne (when he wasn't trying to compose a hit song and strike it rich). This is the stuff of fiction, and readers will find large traces of this family history combined with other families I have seen and imagined, distorted and compressed in the service of telling a story. What I understood, on some level, was that their lives were deeply unsatisfying, That if I were going to find life fulfilling, I would have to ask more and more from it. It took me a while to find out what that more might be, but when Professor Paul Breer, the sociology professor at Cornell who served as my mentor, wrote me a note saying that it was more important to fail at something you love than to succeed at something that means nothing to you, I felt I had no choice but to give up the idea of law school. I became, in spite of the discouragement of my creative writing teacher, a writer, even before I knew what a writer wrote.

Then there's the barely explicable. I always knew, somehow, that the world offered insufficient ecstasy, or, to put it less generously, I was insatiable. More pleasure please. I want to write the poem or story or novel that will make me feel more fully, the poem or story that will change my life, that will, I'm afraid, compensate for all the deprivations that accumulate in anyone's history. This is, of course, too much to ask of poetry or fiction, and when I'm feeling good, thank God, I just write and leave the thinking to the world's many therapists.

Of course there's also the philosophical. I've always been skeptical of anti-intellectual poets who think that thinking is somehow the enemy of art, And I've always admired poets like Coleridge and Randall Jarrell, who considered extending the art as well as their own art. Who made readers consider the meaning of the activity of writing, who made readers re-consider the cultural cliches that dominate any historical moment's thinking. Critics and foundations, of course, have always liked to divide up the goodies: poems by certain people, stories by other people, essays by still other people. While teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English one summer, I talked about an engaging scholarly book on the New Historicism. when a rather snotty critic turned to me and said, "You could understand that book?" No, I wanted to say, we poets just grunt and moan all day. I write essays, in part, because I want to give writers I respect a deserved audience, because like all writers of serious art, I know how discouraging it is to be ignored. But I've also continued to write essays because I've always been intellectually combative: I often grow by opposition, by finding a false authority in the literary world -- usually one insufficiently committed to notions of justice -- and arguing with the purveyors of cultural opinion. In the Nineties, when most American artists have been marginalized and made more esthetically as well as socially conservative , (if we don't matter to the world, too many artists believe, then the sounds and the shapes of words, separate from feeling and culture, must matter), I see this task as increasingly urgent.

Finally, most banally and most importantly, there's the sheer pleasure of writing anything, of putting together word after word, not knowing what will come next, surprising myself about what I know and what I'm going to find out by letting my mind loose among words. What discoveries, what sounds we can make, what figures we can figure out. And though the distinctions are far from neat, poetry always serves to bring me back to my senses and to intensify feeling, fiction helps me investigate characters in the social world, and essays sharpen my thought processes, help me discriminate and qualify half-formed ideas. They give me permission to take time to read philosophy, criticism, art history, and biography.And in my dreams I have another novel to climb, another poem to cross, another essay to charge. And even if Freud and Heidegger were right, that the activity of making is fueled by anxiety, I can't imagine a series of activities, short of residence in a very perverse heaven, that could provide so much pleasure to the worrier.