Ever since Wordsworth made poetry safe for autobiography — a Romantic impulse temporarily dampened by modernism and the impersonal strictures of New Criticism, only to be revived by Lowell and the Confessionals — poets have relied less on the essay as an avenue for discussing the self. These days, when American poets write nonfiction prose, more often than not they’ll choose poetry as their subject, extending the tradition exemplified in our century by the literary essays of Eliot, Jarrell, Stevens, and Bogan, to name only a few. Certainly, poets do take on other, non-literary subjects — Diane Ackerman and Wendell Berry are accomplished nature writers — and, as a series of special issues of the now-defunct Antaeus reminded us — you can always coax a poet to write with gusto about paintings, food, or personal reading tastes.

But essays of this sort assume familiar shapes: a thesis is asserted and developed, an experience sensitively recounted, an aesthetic quality analyzed. Because the form carries a legacy of its own, apart from other literary genres, the poet visits the essay as a child visits the house of a stranger; one must respect the property, be polite, and above all leave the surroundings exactly as found, with nothing disturbed or out of place, no chewing gum stuck under the coffee table. The satisfied reader sighs with the assurance that poets can actually write — you know, with real sentences and paragraphs — after all.

But in Judith Kitchen and Albert Goldbarth we find two poets who, yes, wipe their feet before entering the House of the Essay, but once inside set about re-arranging the furniture. Down comes theLaura Ashley wallpaper; out goes the beige shag carpet. Both exercise the poet’s special talent for associative leaps, the ability to view language through an altogether different lens than that used by a prose writer schooled in the logical consistencies of narrative. Their purpose is not to master the traditional essay form, but to alter it in the direction of the poem. Only the Dance and Great Topics of the World share a focus on time and its most treasured, beguiling symptom, memory, especially the area in which personal and cultural memory intersect. But each writer employs a very different, individualized — indeed poetic — strategy, taking the act of remembrance to a new plane on which the perception of time is synchronous, past and future whirling in a maypole dance around the present until, as Yeats would say, “all the gyres converge in one.” They begin with the assumption that no moment, event, or artifact is wasted or unimportant, that each has its place in the imagination’s reconstruction of a life.

A contributor’s note — the literary magazine’s equivalent of the sound byte biography — would describe Judith Kitchen as a poet (Perennials), editor, and critic (Understanding William Stafford); if an extra line were available, one might also read that she is the mother of two grown sons, was raised in upstate New York, has lived in Britain and Brazil, and is an ardent student of the process of constructing a life, an aficionado of becoming. Well, you might not read that last bit. But, she confesses, rationalizing a desire to eavesdrop on the conversations of others, “I’m interested in how other people manage the business of getting from here to there.” Traveling — through both space and time — is a recurring motif in this collection of eleven essays interspersed with sections of a Welsh vacation diary. With memory serving as mediator and spiritual odometer, as both source and destination, the movement of the self — or one’s ever-shifting idea of the self — demands a presentation no linear narrative structure can adequately accommodate.

Take, for example, Kitchen’s essay, “Research.” Combining passages from Henri Bergson, newspaper clippings, old family papers, and personal remembrances with her own philosophical reflections, she attempts to establish or recognize the pattern of her own presence — implicitly defined here asknowledge — through a welter of perceptions, family memoirs and “facts” scattered across time, bound together insofar as they are considered by a single consciousness. Her strategy in arranging the varied elements involved in recollecting a self is less methodical than intuitive and stems from Bergson’s observation that the present shapes the selection of memories constituting a past:

Intuition — the sense that one detail is more “right” or telling than another —governs the way Kitchen turns “...toward the present, taking from it what it needs to keep shaping the past,” and it serves her marvelously well in organizing the rich variety of what she finds: her physicist-father’s oddly engineered badminton racquets (“You don’t play to win — you play to see what will happen”), the second-grade presidential election in which Norman Thomas gets one vote (guess whose?), a Watergate theory based on Hollywood typecasting, Morris dancers on a village green, first news of Hiroshima, a terrifying recollection of a flooding farm, her grandfather’s pronouncements on the value of reading Proust. Patterns are discerned, ideas echoed, new knowledge gained, and the present makes sudden and unexpected sense of the past, which in turn leads to intimations of the future. And what’s most gratifying is that the reader seems to experience this process along with the writer, sharing the sense of coincidence and revelation.

But a complete picture of identity demands more than a composite of childhood epiphanies and those moments of joy or extremity that families often take the trouble to record. There’s social identity to consider as well, and in an essay titled “Midge” — the name of the smart, caring, competent, but non-blonde, non-bombshell Jimmy Stewart didn’t pursue in Hitchcock’s Vertigo — Kitchen defines the character played by Barbara Bel Geddes as metaphor for feminism, opposing that of the shallow, coldbut haunting Madeleine/Carlotta played by Kim Novak, the romanticized object of desire men have created: “No, they don’t want Midge... She blows out the candles and turns out the lights. She stands before them — in her glaring equality — and dares them to want what they already know.” But for a young girl coping with adolescence in the l950s, reconciling the two opposing models becomes an uncertain challenge:

Kitchen injects Sylvia Plath’s poetry and notebook entries into the conversation as well (What I want back is what I was./…Before the brooch-pin and the salve/Fixed me in this parenthesis), finding in Plath’s writing the confirmation and solace she and others might have assimilated in their own lives to keep from swallowing — or being swallowed by — the manufactured illusions of popular culture.

Only the Dance is scenic and sharp, unpredictable and meditative, a scintillating example of what memory can tell us about our present and future, and how the present lends coherence to the past. True, other people’s lives must struggle for relevance against our own, distract us somehow from our immediate preoccupations, but Kitchen’s family — she includes a generous selection of their photographs — proves to be as articulate, as colorful, and as eccentric as any family we might wish to be a part of. And in essays like “Robert Jimmy Allen” and “Not Less Because: Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens” (an empathic improvisation on lines from Stevens’ poems) she gives heft to the assumption that literature changes lives, makes them singular: “The nature of literature is individual.The literary ‘I’ speaks from the self; it opposes community. It is the private, briefly made public through the shared medium of language. This is its very reason for being.”

Singularity is also a hallmark of Albert Goldbarth’s work, and those familiar with the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink-cosmos encompassed by his ubiquitous poems will find themselves comfortably at the mercy of his mad but benign genius in Great Topics of the World. An omniscient presence with a vested interest in details, Goldbarth may well be the only living writer who can get away with titles like “The History of the Universe Is Important to This Story,” a feat he accomplishes by making the reader believe that he really does have an insider’s view of human history, that there really are connections between the extravagances of Prague’s Rudolf II, the nature of DNA, and neighbor Itzie “The Discount Siding and Paint Prince” Mandelbaum’s sleazy adultery in 1962 Chicago, or between Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars, the creator of Krazy Kat, and the courtship of Goldbarth’s grandparents. If James Burke had a stronger sense of humor than even he thinks he has, the droll British historian would be hard-pressed to out-Rube Goldberg Goldbarth in plotting the crazy-quilt nervous system of history. But then Burke, like any scholar on a grant, must bow to the reality of recorded, university press-approved fact; as a poet, Goldbarth’s imagination knows no statute of limitations on cause and effect, no incident buried in the “clefts and swells” of the past that might not somehow ripple out to his own life, taking its place in the “pop-historical voyeuristic pseudo-memoir” he seems to have invented.

And the bridges from civilization’s past to Goldbarth’s can be wildly incongruous. In an essay titled “Delft,” the unit of measurement from van Leeuwenhoek’s invention of the microscope to our hero’s incipient love life in the late 1960s is the lowly flea:

Zoom ahead two centuries or so later, to the days when Goldbarth “was so new that [his] heart squeaked like a boot fresh from the box.” Leaping into a new universe of sensual geometries graphed by the Sexual Revolution (“that limited range of ourselves we understood in those hazed over days to be our whole existence”), he encounters the little world-spanning pests for the first time thanks to his lover’s “pug-snouted marmalade tabby so evolved toward feline unapproachability, sharing its fleas with us seemed its singlemost warmhearted gesture.” Above the young lovers’ bed hangs a print of Vermeer’s View of Delft, Leeuwenhoek’s birthplace, one of those not-so-coincidental links and opportunities for controlled digression that Goldbarth weaves through his labyrinthine essays like Theseus’ thread.

And so we have a meditation on the microscope, the flea (especially the connection between fleas and sex), Vermeer, the plague, flea circuses, breaking up, making up, and the way one’s own youth recedes from the present until it seems someone else’s. Still, the main ingredient in Goldbarth’s idea-stew is kindness, or at least empathy. His pleasure in constructing the potential of the past bubbles through the verbal acrobatics and encyclopedic references; his narrative omniscience works to humanize his subjects within the context of their own existence, not to march out as literary word fodder. “Planet earth,” he writes, “has long ties and cunning grapnels,” and Goldbarth knows just how long and how cunning these can be, even in a single pimply unsure life, an adolescence spent reading science fiction anddaydreaming about the girl in home room, or a graying middle-age in the process of discovering that what has come before it — shaped it — could not have been understood before this present, this particular now, and that tomorrow will alter even that understanding.

Did Amy Lowell really ride on a train to Arizona with Goldbarth’s grandma Rosie in 1912, thinking that this foreign woman with “three roughwoven scarves worn simultaneously” must surely be a bomb-toting anarchist? Did Rabbi Loew, alchemist and supposed creator of the mythic, avenging Golem, really join Kepler and Tycho Brahe for dinner, debate, and star gazing? Did Goldbarth’s grandpa Louie actually give Percival Lowell a pair of rose-colored glasses, which he used to revision the southwestern landscape as the dunes of Mars? It doesn’t matter, since encounters like these are imagined so finely, with such attention to gesture, smell, and texture that they seem infinitely more real, more authentic, than last week’s instant-crisis mini-series on CNN or the jackknifed tractor-trailer on the local news. When Goldbarth talks about Mars “with its umlaut of moons,” or says of a lover: “all by herself she outnumbered me,” or admits to a “pencil’s-worth of comprehension” in deciphering the alien worlds of time and change, he reveals a gentleness that tempers all the smartass Buck Rogers zap-and-zowie he’s famous for. Here’s a poet who keeps his space helmet on tight among the flat, cratered plains of prose, one who knows that our earth is both the closest and most distant planet imaginable, and that in fact it exists to be imagined — not as it appears, but as our hearts know it to be.

The greatest confidence a writer can entrust to a reader is his or her own pattern of thought, the topographic map of one’s private road to knowledge and self-awareness within a cluttered, often surreal culture. Judith Kitchen and Albert Goldbarth give no less than that.