It Is Difficult to Get the News From Poetry

by Erin Quick, Staff Member, Left Bank Books

I have enjoyed poetry since I was a young child, but it wasn't until much later that I experienced what might be called a sort of awakening. I fell madly in love with poetry when I was twenty years old, thanks to a very fine teacher, and I spent the next four years really learning how to read it. In many ways, I am still learning. I read Galway Kinnell's poems "Under the Maud Moon" and "Little Sleep's- Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight" (from The Book of Nightmares during my freshman year in college, and my life was literally transformed.

April is upon us again, and it's what we here in America call National Poetry Month. Established by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, April is now designated as a month-long, national celebration of poetry, complete with a poster campaign to help "increase poetry awareness." In some ways, it's enough to make you want to roll your eyes. Don't get me wrong, I understand the importance of this kind of celebration, especially if poetry is not receiving proper attention, and I support it. But from the perspective of a poetry lover, I can't help it - the phrase "increase poetry awareness" gives me pause. Am I being asked to admit that poetry is a minority?
Is poetry in danger of being entirely forgotten amidst the flash and click of our techno-cult-ure? Does poetry matter anymore? Can it matter (as Dana Gioia so famously asked)?

I believe the answer is, simply, yes. We need poetry like we need food. It is nourishing, it helps us to heal and to grow, and it tastes good. It holds tremendous power, the power to transform (Mark Strand has a delightful poem about this power called "Eating Poetry" from Reasons for Moving). Poetry also tells you how to live, how to get by and get through. It serves a a reminder, and reading it regularly, like going to a service each week, is a ritual of which it is well-deserving. A poem, what one poet called "moments of being," is so distilled that it can't help but offer a clarity that other forms of literature cannot quite match. It is a direct hit, right on the nerve, and it resonates.

The Mexican poet Octavio Paz makes clear culture's insistence on poetry. In his book The Bow and the Lyre he writes, "Poetry belongs to all epochs: it is man's natural form of expression. There are no peoples without poetry... Therefore, it can be said that... the existence of a society without songs, myths, or other poetic expressions is inconceivable."

So why, then do we feel the need to designate (not dedicate) a National Poetry Month? Why don't Americans pay poetry attention? The glib answer: television, cell phones, computers. But that isn't entirely accurate or fair, whatever the truth may be in it. Here's the thing: our culture tends to be fast- paced and market-driven. Poetry is neither. A poem asks you to slow down, to take it one breath at a time. It moves in lines, accords to rhythms. It is not a riddle to be solved, but a song to be experienced, through language, that will ring true. And it takes time, with benefits not in dollars and cents, but in "pleasure, enlightenment, and consolation."

Poetry is as diverse as the people on the planet. There truly is something for everyone. There is the beauty of Shakespeare or Blake, the drunken craziness of Sufi poets like Rumi or Hafiz,the
deceptively simple Billy Collins or Ted Kooser, the fierceness of Sonia Sanchez or Gwendolyn Brooks, the Wacky Kenneth Koch, the beats of Allen Ginsberg, the politically charged Adrienne Rich or Kenneth Patchen, the endless praise-songs of Walt Whitman, the gentle wisdom of Zen masters like Muso Soseki... The list goes on and on and on, but with a little exploration and patience, everyone is bound to come across a poet who speaks to them. In the end, it all comes back to communication - a miracle, really, but then, what more can we possibly ask?