Who cares about poetry, anyway?

When I was a Fulbright Fellow in Saint Petersburg, Russia in early 2003, there to write a book of poetry in Russia’s most literary city, the American consulate decided to throw a free “public” event to introduce the Fellows to a select crowd of Russian citizens. So there we stood, all in a row, while the consul, a big, cheerful American, gave a brief speech about the program, then introduced us by name, outlining each course of study. The crowd responded politely to each, as Petersburgers do: Christina Arnold, Water Treatment; Matthew Rossetti, Individual Legal Rights; and so on, until the words, Sam Witt, Poet. Even before the interpreter could translate it, a gasp went around the room.

The audience’s reaction was clear: You Americans don’t really do this poetry thing. You might do the Hollywood thing, the tech thing, the nation-building thing, and (at least until this year) the high finance thing. But not that poetry thing. Ah, but we do. We just don’t know it.

Which presents me with a rhetorical question: Why don’t Americans gasp when you tell them that you’re a poet? In such circumstances, when I reveal to strangers that distinguished secret, on a plane, say, I’m almost always confronted with a whole series of responses that reveal, at best, a troubled relationship to poetry, at worst, a tepid one. If the tone varies from person to person, the content tends to be a variation on a theme, as in, what’s your real job? How do you make money at that? There was the economics professor on a flight out of Richmond who wrote me a business plan on how to make my poetry “more commercial,” or the fellow in the sauna at the gym who advised me to look into positions at Hallmark, or the woman who told me what was wrong with “poets these days,” shortly afterwards confessing that she couldn’t name a single living poet.

I’ve gotten other observations about the value and relevance of poetry but never once has anybody yet gasped, nor looked at me with anything approaching admiration, to say nothing of envy. Not in this country. They were all saying the same thing with different words: Poetry would be great, if it were only something else, something that entertained us, provided a service, fixed your roof, or had some nutritional value. If only you could make a movie out of a poem, or turn it into a pop song, then you might have something. But almost each one, on trains, planes, or buses, at the post office or public library, has always added a disclaimer: “Of course, I’m not a poetry person.” To which I respond now, “Yes you are. You just don’t know it yet.”

What’s poetry for?

I would endure any number of guys with collar gape telling me to write a novel or get a real job, just to hear that sweet, sudden, then sustained intake of breath, just once, here, in my own country. Not just because it would let a little bit of air out of this uniquely American notion that everything must have a practical purpose and a price tag, but because a gasp is an expression of pure delight and surprise, and that’s what I think poetry should provide. What’s a poem for? The exact same thing a gasp is for, pure experience of an actual moment. I want the “ah,” as in, “Ah, sunflower, weary of time/ Who countest the steps of the sun/ Seeking after that sweet golden clime/ Where the traveller’s journey is done”, from a poem by my first hero, William Blake, the 18th century poet and mystic who saw angels in the trees as a child, who would probably be homeless if he lived in America today, or tenured in the UVA Creative Writing Program, if he were lucky enough to live in Charlottesville: “Where the Youth pined away with desire,/ And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow:/ Arise from their graves and aspire,/ Where my sunflower wishes to go.”

In this case, the youth could be Paul Legault, an aspiring poet and fresh graduate who’s from the University’s MFA program, and the sweet golden clime could be one of the walled gardens behind the West Range, where Edgar Allen Poe wrote some of his earliest poems and where I ask Legault just what he thinks poetry is for. “It’s freedom,” he says “…and the ultimate proof that I’m human.”

Or ask Charles Wright. “Poetry is the stairway to God,” says the UVA professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. “And my vision is to be saved man.”

Rita Dove asked the question out loud recently, as we sat in her office, talking about her latest book, Sonata Mulattica, which is about a young, half-African violinist named George Bridgetower who apprenticed with Beethoven. This is how she answered herself: “If you read a poem, it makes you breathe along with it, so that you can taste the salt and the sweat as it drips down. Then you feel it, then it blossoms inside of you, and you actually claim it as your own, because it’s your breath that it’s riding on.” The sound of that breath, the proof that you’ve put your own unique stamp on the poem you’re resurrecting inside of you, in short, is that it makes you gasp.

Poets speak public truths in an intimate voice, not to an audience, but to one reader at a time, even if that act is replicated many times. Poets attend the present moment. They are nurtured by it, be it pleasurable or atrocious, whether the poem takes place in Iraq or in the poet’s bedroom, whether it’s a report from the University of Toronto about the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapsing that informs the poem, or a report from the surface in the form of an unseasonably hot wind, running across her body as bugs thump against the bare light bulb. Poets receive this divergent data and make it personal, intimate. They share that moment, devastating or delightful, with strangers, but in an intimate tone of voice, whether it’s a shout or a whisper, because the content of poems is too personal to be shared with people you know.

Not only does poetry speak from and to a private part of the American psyche, it also happens to play a useful role in American public life, which can be broken down into two categories. First, poetry helps us to deal with and find meaning in moments of acute crisis. Two examples come to mind: the aftermath of 9/11, during which there was a sudden widespread fascination with Auden’s poem about the invasion of Poland, “September 1, 1939,” and, closer to home, the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, which inspired a convocation elegy by Nikki Giovanni. I can endure the rather—forgive me—hokie assumption that “We are Virginia Tech,” from Giovanni’s 2007 poem, simply because in the wake of that tragedy, you couldn’t read a media story about it without hearing that refrain. Giovanni had distilled the most terrified intimate thoughts into a line of poetry. More than simply illustrating my point, it showed us, as one culture, taking the media attention away from the violence and redirecting it to where it belonged: our attempt to make sense of it through language, art, music and culture.

Second, poetry is a means of public celebration and, as the presence of poetry at inaugurations from John Fitzgerald Kennedy to Barrack Hussein Obama has shown, it’s a huge part of the body politic. It doesn’t just celebrate political victories, either. It’s a way of speaking truth to power, of reminding the man with his hand on the bible that we’re watching, and we’re paying attention, that his power consists of our participation and awareness, that power without that is simply empty and cruel. Remember that amazing poem the Reverend Lowry delivered at Obama’s inauguration? Remember that extraordinary demand, that “white do what was right,” right in front of Cheney and Company? The reason we remember it is the turn of phrase and the rhyme, but it accomplished so much more. Maybe that’s why recent news of the White House Poetry Slam (which fetched a mighty laugh on “The Daily Show”) resonated so. Maybe that’s why Stalin killed poets, because he was afraid of us. Maybe that’s why there’s a poem written over the gates of America, at the base of Lady Liberty herself, clutching her book, her torch, and her crown. Give me your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, and I’ll give you a nation of poetry, and not just during National Poetry Month, either.

This is why poets are prophets; not because we tell the future or read the entrails of animals, but because we make sense of tragedy and celebrate victory. But not one of the poets I talked to for this article was willing to admit it, not Wright, not Dove, not Kendra Hamilton, nor Greg Orr. But poets are prophets, in the sense that we bear witness with excruciating attention to what’s happening now. And because the voice we create out of this physical reality cannot be paraphrased, because the meaning is in the actual texture and rhythm of the language, it belongs to whoever reads it. In the era when our language is being hijacked by consumer gibberish, as poet and man of God Dixon Coons says, taking care with language is alone a prophetic act.

And yet, the “I’m not a poetry person” people are still out there, standing in line at the post office, or boarding a bus, waiting to tell me that they aren’t poetry people, and that poetry isn’t important. Really? Even as poets all across this town alone are creating out of the tensions, fears, pleasures, and small details of our lives voices that stretch the present moment forward into the future, and back into time through the act of reading? That’s why there’s a kind of extra-temporal motion that connects us to one another, even the living and the dead. When Charles Wright says that poetry is the stairway to God, he means that literally, even though he doesn’t believe in God, because poetry makes a god out of each moment. Poetry is a kind of stairway to the hidden parts of ourselves, but also one that connects us to strangers. Or, as Orr put it, “a great poem is a poem that saves you, because when you get the right poem or the right song, you’re half reading it and it’s half reading you.” Orr should know about being saved: He turned to poetry as a young man after a hunting trip in New York State at the age of 12, during which the gun in his hand went off, killing his little brother Peter. How could you survive such a thing? Only by writing about it in poems.

“When you were a young man, you didn’t just read Blake, you were connected to Blake,” he said to me in his office, after telling me what I’d already discovered years ago, when I was his student, simply by reading his tortured, beautiful poems about his brother. “Read Blake? That doesn’t explain it; that’s not what was going on. Oh, I read Blake? I loved Blake? He was walking with you, he was talking with you.”

Who cares about poetry, anyway?

A lot of people care about poetry, in Charlottesville anyway. For example, the class of students at Writers’ House, the ones I met when I visited Judy Longley’s poetry writing class, the ones who looked incensed when I put to them this article’s central question. “If you want to prove that poetry isn’t dead,” one student said hotly, “you have to visit Slam Richmond on Saturdays and Thursdays.” Or what about the girl in the yellow dress at the student reading on Monday night at the Tea Bazaar, the one who took the stage and purred into the mic that she was “really into natural disaster poems.” Did it sound peculiar? Sure, until she read the exquisitely sad and lyrical poems about her family’s experience with tornadoes and hurricanes. Why did she care about poetry? Because in a poem, she could say things to her father that she couldn’t say in real life.

Who cares about poetry, other than the parents of poets? In this town, multitudes. Like Julia Hansen, the woman who tossed off that quip. She’s also a student at the MFA program at the University and the editor of Meridian, which, along with the Virginia Quarterly Review, is one of the two nationally distributed literary journals in Charlottesville. Julia and her husband Joseph, also a recent graduate of the program and also a poet, met and fell in love in a series of poetry workshops, both at the University of North Carolina and here. So in a sense, if we accept that poetry is the voice of love, then the two of them have lived poetry, because their relationship has run concurrent to their development as poets. Consider the man named Randy, who called in to WTJU the day I guest read my work on Paul Legault and Orion Jenkins’ rock ’n’ roll poetry and radio show, the one who read me a poem about his daughter’s doll, named “Pigarina.” Or the half-crazed fellow who called up a moment later to lecture me about metaphor?

Who cares about poetry? John Casten IV, my oldest poetry friend, who just published his first poetry book, Free Union, has his own list. People who care about poetry are “driving taxi cabs or working in law offices or going to medical school.” He even told me his own version of the sitting-on-the-plane story, only his took place at Staples Barbershop, and it ended quite differently. “You write poetry?” the barber asked him, then squinted for a long moment. “Good. Keep doing that. We need more of that.”

Rita Dove had the unique vantage of being the nation’s poet laureate, and so she knows who cares about poetry: “Housewives, lawyers, carpenters, Korean immigrant standing in line at the DMV,” she told me. “But they usually began their letters by saying, ‘I don’t know a lot about poetry.’” Why the apology? Both Dove and Casteen make essentially the same argument: It aggrieves people that poets are shoplifting this thing that we use every day, language, for something that to them seems like a higher purpose.

I argue that every single one of those people who’ve confronted me over the years cared deeply about poetry, especially Gary, the graduate student in a bar who told me that poetry was a dead art and that only losers practiced it. I argue that each and every one of you who told me what was wrong with poetry betrayed your own argument by exhibiting a violent and desperate need for poetry, if only because you unwittingly identified it with something you feared was missing from your life: relevance, or meaning, or money. Poets these days…maybe you just don’t read enough of them, which is the only reason, Gary, or Mr. Economics Professor, that you’re not a poetry person. It’s like saying you aren’t a human person. All that talk about money? It’s a crass attempt to value something that’s missing, this powerful thing, as Casteen says, “that connects people.” Of course poetry is taboo: it represents an affront and a violation of that most American of values, the private self. It declares, by connecting us, that there’s no such thing, not if we want to survive, and that’s the ultimate public use for poetry.

I’m not a poetry person

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard it, from friends, family members, and acquaintances who claim to be interested in history or biography instead. I’m not a poetry person. Imagine a simple substitution. What if I said I’m not a history person? Would it even make sense? Or, to choose somewhat at random, I’m not an architecture person, a democracy person, a politics person? I’m not a love person, I’m more of a like person. You get the idea, but because I’m a poetry person, I’ll go on: I’m not a notice that the stinkbug who has come to rest on the glowing lampshade after minutes of frantic erratic elliptical orbiting has a red underwing kind of person, for poetry draws its meanings, its immediate power from the physical world. It draws us together into a teachable moment about how to witness that world, and maybe just start to save it, or ourselves. It is a conduit, a portal into this moment, this now, a crucial thing “these days” when we’re so often divorced from locality, from our bodies, in another place, on the cellphone, online, texting.

This isn’t bad, but poetry brings us back into our bodies by getting us to use language and mooring us in an urgent moment; poetry is good practice for the art of physical and emotional presence. The point: Poetry is about celebrating the physical moment with language. The presence of poetry is a gigantic affirmation, Greg Orr says: “it’s like an iPod the size of the moon, or a gigantic jukebox, with every poem and every song ever written. You’re feeling blue? Put a quarter in the jukebox and out comes Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale.’” It builds community outward from that initial relationship between poet and reader to the very institutions that sustain culture, which is the very definition of public life. Consider the poetry reading at The Bridge/Progressive Arts Initiative last Fall, “What Peaches and Penumbra,” named for a line from Ginsberg, in which each performer read just one poem they loved. Like Ebony Walden’s poetry night at Bel Rio last month, three deep at the bar and the most racially and age integrated crowd that local poet and politician Kendra Hamilton had ever witnessed. Like Hamilton herself, the Goddess of Gumbo, author of a book by that name, former city councilor, who said to me without batting an eyelid, “I’m the servant of the people, that’s why I was on City Council. I help people.” And her political career, Hamilton told me, was a direct extension of her fundamental role as a poet. “You don’t have to know a trochee from a dactyl to be attuned to it.”

And not to put too fine a point on it, but yes, poetry is free, in the sense that nobody really pays you to write it and you don’t really have to pay up to read poems, not if you have internet access or a public library card, or if you live near The Bridge.

This might be the single most radical characteristic of poetry: It’s free. This, in an age where we tend to reduce everything to its dollar value and find a marketing niche for it—remember the economics professor on the plane? Entry at The Bridge? A suggested donation. Permission to flip through books at your grandmother’s house? Gratis. A word with Edgar Allen Poe? An Audience with the Pope, Alexander, that is? Not a dime. Download a poem from the VQR website? Nada. I bet that’s about the most radical business model you’ve heard all day, professor.