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Poetry nation? | page 1, 2
A cheering number of people with titles like "farmer" and "cashier" and
"homemaker" do appear, people who have no obvious reason to be all that
interested in poetry. There's even a handyman from North Carolina who
loves the Prologue to "The Canterbury Tales" (though there's perhaps
some explanation in the fact that he's also a "Zen teacher," which he
describes as an extension of his career in "fixing things"). Americans' Favorite Poems Edited by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz
But in the midst of all the carefully assembled populism, there is a telling moment. It comes in an entry by a construction worker in Boston, who sent in a selection from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" with this account: "In 1994 I began attending the University of Massachusetts as an English major. This was looked upon by many of my coworkers as nothing less than ridiculous. I guess a ditchdigger who reads Shakespeare is still just a ditchdigger." Which raises an interesting question: While it's inspiring and true that there are working-class people out there going back to school and learning to love poetry (the Boston construction worker goes on to say how poetry has helped him and fueled his self-esteem), how strong is the tide that pulls against them? I can't help feeling that for every person like this guy, or, for that matter, for every white-collar guy who is equally driven to discover poetry in his off-hours, there are at least 50 others who think they're absolutely nuts -- who look blank when poetry is mentioned and dismiss the whole enterprise by saying "I don't understand poetry." As much as I'd like to believe that we're in some kind of poetry renaissance in the U.S. of A., I have a hard time doing it. Sales of poetry books haven't increased. The NEA grants money to poets only every other year now, instead of every year. Despite all the M.F.A.s, solid teaching jobs are scarce, and publishing houses, which have to worry about costs more than ever, aren't rushing to build up their poetry lists. If people are reading Merrill on the subway -- which they very well may be doing -- they're probably not going out to buy his collected works and sitting down with it after dinner. In an odd way, Pinsky seems to know the limits of his endeavor. As he comments on what he calls the "double nature" of poetry, the way it's an intimate art comprised of the most public of all mediums, language, he says that "in a different country -- say, one where great national poets were shared as part of patriotic feeling, or where there was social prestige in knowing lines by heart -- this duality of poetic feeling might be less poignantly distinct." Yes -- in a different country. But in this one it often seems to receive a lot of fanfare with little substance to back it up. Then again, maybe that's precisely what separates poetry from other genres -- its mysterious, persistent existence in an ever-modernizing world. Who knows how many poetry-loving people out there didn't even write in to the Favorite Poem Project because they wanted to keep their secret to themselves? In his poem "The Great Poet Returns," Mark Strand writes, "Tell me, you people out there, what is poetry anyway?/
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