Don’t pity T.S. yet. Earlier this week, hundreds of Manhattanites happily paid between $35 and more than $400 to watch Meryl Streep, Diane Sawyer, Wynton Marsalis, Kevin Kline and other A-list stars read their favorite poems at the Lincoln Center during a benefit for The Academy of American Poets, which launched National Poetry Month in 1996. “By buying a ticket tonight, you are supporting our programs and helping with this work-which is so important because everyone owns poetry, not just poets,” Tree Swenson, the academy’s executive director, told the audience.
It is one thing to pack a New York house with well-heeled patrons when the draw is top talent reading good poems. But if everyone really does own poetry, does the country really need to share National Anxiety Month with it? Does dedicating April to “poetry” demean the art by treating it glibly, or does spreading the gospel of verse convince people who wouldn’t otherwise read poetry to glance at a few stanzas? The country’s leading poets are themselves divided on the topic.
“I’m an elitist pig,” Richard Howard tells NEWSWEEK, only half-joking. “If your story’s about National Poetry Month, I think you’d be better off speaking to someone else.” Howard-poetry editor of the Paris Review, Pulitzer Prize-winner and MacArthur “genius” grant recipient-in the keynote speech at the 1996 PEN Literary Awards, called the newly launched National Poetry Month a “deleterious development … which I have no hesitation in calling the worst thing to have happened to poetry since the advent of the camera and the internal combustion engine, two inventions that W.H. Auden once declared to be the bane of our modernity.” Poetry, he tells NEWSWEEK, is to be enjoyed “in secret,” privately, on a personal level-not read in bites on billboards and subway placards. And if poetry gets a bad rap for being too difficult, too elitist, so be it, he says.
Which invites the question: What do people want from their poetry? Collins is alternately lauded and derided for writing accessible poetry that is occasionally touching and often quite funny. “I have a theory that poetry should be like an eye chart in your ophthalmologist’s office,” he says. The first big ‘E’ should be easy to read, drawing the reader in. Only then should it become increasingly “mysterious.” Take, for example, Gwendolyn Brooks’ 1966 poem “We Real Cool,” which was read by designer Cynthia Rowley at the New York fundraiser this week:
Die soon."
Or Marianne Moore’s “Poetry,” which was read by actor Kevin Kline:
“I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.”
Every poet interviewed for this piece-all of whom conceded that the notion of a National Poetry Month was at least a little silly-emphasized both time and timelessness when explaining why poetry matters. “Imagine that you lived in a culture where there had never been a re-creation in powerful words of life of the past, of feeling,” says Helen Vendler, a poetry scholar at Harvard University. “You would be living in what [Wallace] Stevens called a landscape of the dead, where no one had ever lived before you … What would it be like to live in such a culture?” Former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky writes in an e-mail interview that poetry “fills a human appetite: it matters the way cuisine matters beyond nutrition, or lovemaking matters beyond procreation. Like music and dance, it is at the center of human intelligence.” Former Poet Laureate Robert Hass points to the emergence hip-hop as a “pure eruption of out of the oral tradition of poetry; it’s kind of fascinating because not only did it come out of the oral traditions but it came out of the worst school districts in the country. As an argument for ‘do people need poetry?’ go devastate their school systems.”
Others see the political potential of poetry. Sam Hamill, founder of Copper Canyon Press in Washington State, last year started Poets Against the War, a group of poets who protested, and continue to speak out against, the U.S.-led war on Iraq. “The subject of poetry is character. How can you examine character without examining a political aspect, even sort of peripherally?” he asks. “Show me a great poet any time in history who is apolitical.” Hass explains poetry’s political “trickle down theory. It’s hard to imagine that the New Deal would ever have happened without Walt Whitman,” he says. Poetry and politics were also intertwined at The Academy of American Poets reading last week too: Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” made a last-minute change to the program and read Joseph Brodsky’s bone-chilling “Bosnia Tune” to mark the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and academy co-chair Jorie Graham concluded the reading with an exhortation: “For every lie we’re told by advertisers and politicians, we need one poem to balance it.”
Just as poetry mingles with politics, it also goes surprisingly well with money. Last year’s benefit raised some $180,000 for the academy’s Web site and various programs. “The romantic notion that poetry and money don’t mix is simply that: romantic,” says Swenson, the academy’s executive director. “Like the other arts, poetry and its makers need support-from audiences, venues, and arts organizations. In this culture, philanthropic support for poetry provides nowhere near an amount to match the immense value of great poems.” And that’s the rub with poetry, any month of the year: Emily Dickinson never had any philanthropic support (or, for that matter, a National Poetry Month) and died unknown in 1886. But that didn’t stop her, just as hip-hop would grow up spontaneously a century later on devastated streets. The best living poet today may be toiling in total obscurity much like Dickinson did in her time, stopping to write the occasional observation that “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it.”
