"I had to do it," said Peter Harris. Writing a poem's the only way to deal with a fatal auto accident when you're 16. "Poetry begins in tension," he said. "Robert Frost said it begins with a lump in your throat. A poem can begin in anger but it has to end in understanding, or healthy respect for your own ignorance. It's about redeeming something from loss or conflict or tragedy." It's not a matter of saying great things, says Harris, Colby professor of English and author of Blue Hallelujahs, winner of the 1996 Maine Chapbook competition. "Auden said if a writer says, `I have important things to say'" --Harris makes a dismissive gesture. Then he lights up. "But if he says, `I like hanging around words listening to what they say . . . '" Peter Harris listens, and he quotes what he hears--poetry, poets, educators, public personalities. "I have soundbytes in my head," he said. "I can remember fragments. It's all that lead paint I ate as a kid." Lead paint, whatever, Harris is going full tilt in a second. You wonder what intuition or insight he'll come out with. Another quotation? An anecdote, an irony, an intimidating castigation of the state of the world or himself? What will he teach you next? "Do you know Leonard Cohen? He's so mellow now," Harris said. "He says, `There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.'" He smiles and nods his head. Cohen's lines are about consciousness and imperfection and healing, all of them close to the heart of Peter Harris. "That's why it's a joy to teach writing--it's an integrative activity, a coming into consciousness," he said. "Writing's a means of understanding. It's not intellectual understanding. In poetry image is fundamental. You find the gesture that says more than any idea. The idea has to be deeply embedded--because it's more profound than anything you could state. You consciously process your own experience--and redeem it. When you explain what it feels like to be human, there definitely is a redemptive element." Harris's own poetry ranges through the emotions. In the mirror he sees his face, "a bulging white duffle bag . . . my features/tattooed on a gravity-ravaged fanny." He worries about his unborn children, fearing that "Our home might end up as a ward for quads or quints" or "the future/might be filled with pale green corridors." He is anguished and outraged about contemporary battlefields, both real and figurative: Desert Storm, part of the secret poisoning of the planet by "the little puff your eyes can't see . . . won't be over for two-hundred-fifty-thousand years." This is a conscience that talks to itself in public. It talks back to a world it knows is messing up. The force behind the eight sections of Colby's English composition course with a community service component, Harris also challenges students to be aware of that world. Volunteers in the elementary, junior high or high schools as teachers' assistants help in classes or with recreation or after-school enrichment and, through an abundance of reading and writing, reflect on economic inequalities or the school system in America. The effect of community service, Harris says, is to raise men in moral development (where women rate higher) and women in self-confidence (where men rate higher). "I'm not redeeming them from selfishness," he said, noting that 200 or 300 Colby students volunteer on a regular basis. "It's not good for people who have been given so much not to do something." The sardonic part of Harris believes that the faculty generally lags behind in community service because they have "what Northrup Frye called `the myth of concern.'" But teaching is a helping profession, he says, citing Marian Wright Edelman. "It's a form of service to give something back to the country. Leaving the world and the country better than you found it is worth shooting at." Making a good poem is, too. Even though you shouldn't think you're doing something for somebody other than yourself, Harris says, being completely engrossed for two hours making something as good as you can make it is a pleasure, and the work is important. "I shudder at my blind spots and inauthenticities," he said. "But if you're conscious of the things going on in your head, then they have less hold on you. Then you're not as angry--you've got more perspective on life. You become happy. Keep it up long enough," said Harris, preaching what he practices, "joy begins to stick its toe in the door."