Back in 1991, Dana Gioia, a former marketing executive who quit his job at General Foods to spend more time writing poetry, published an essay in the Atlantic Monthly called "Can Poetry Matter?" In the piece, which evolved into a book of the same title, he attacked academia for cutting the general public off from poetry. Gioia questioned whether there was a place in modern America for poetry as a popular art. He bemoaned, for example, the disappearance of the daily poem in the newspaper. But he nevertheless concluded that all hope was not lost for poetry in this country.
In the years since, despite NEA budget cuts and widespread apathy about the arts, new poetry initiatives (for lack of a better word) have sprung up all over the place. It's not so much that poets themselves have enjoyed renewed support, financial or otherwise, but rather that a kind of civic-minded love of poetry seems to be in style. It's hard to recall a time when National Poetry Month didn't burst upon us every April like some flamboyant antidote to Eliot's famous line. When we didn't have Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky reciting topical verse on the Lehrer Newshour. When there weren't Barnes and Nobles nationwide with whole aisles devoted to poetry, and with portraits of Frost, Yeats and other venerable bards on prominent display. What was it like when Poetry in Motion wasn't offering to brighten New Yorkers' days with thought-provoking verse pasted up in the subway and on buses? When people didn't hang out by the refrigerator at parties, dashing off couplets with their hosts' magnetic poetry kits? Writing programs offering M.F.A.s have proliferated. All across the land, poetry is apparently flourishing.
In many ways, all of this is reason to celebrate, especially for a person like me, a fan of the stanza. But oddly, I find myself feeling ambivalent about these well-meant efforts. While I applaud them, I'm not entirely convinced that having James Merrill's poetry posted in the subway means that Everyman is reading it on the way to work. There is value in exposing people to poetry at any level, of course, but I'm not yet sure that that greater exposure means we exist in a poetry-loving nation.
My ambivalence was further aroused when Pinsky started the Favorite Poem Project, for which Americans were asked to send in a beloved poem along with a letter explaining their choice. The poems and letters are to be put into an archive, as a way to give future generations "a snapshot of the United States at the turn of the millennium year, through the lens of poetry." Pinsky was overwhelmed with responses. A nationwide reading series and a Web site were launched, and it turned out that everyone from the president and his wife to the smallest schoolchild seemed to be harboring a favorite poem.
Now, in anticipation of the archive, comes a book called "Americans' Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology." Its 200 poems were chosen from the thousands of entries Pinsky and co-editor Maggie Dietz received specifically to represent the diversity of American heritage and interests. It is, in many ways, a wonderful book, by which I mean that it contains many wonderful poems. Leafing through it one night, I was surprised, I admit, to discover one of my own college favorites, "The Rain," by Robert Creeley, who isn't exactly up there with Frost (the most-picked poet) in name recognition. It goes like this:
All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is itthat never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for mesomething other than this,
something not so insistent --
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting outof the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.
It's a poem about the discomfort that's inherent to the state of being human and the search for someone to put oneself at ease. The woman who sent "The Rain" to the Favorite Poem Project says as much: "It reminds me of what it is to be human. Stanzas two through four make me uneasy," she writes, "but by five and six I feel content ... I feel that the poem is very earnest, so it reminds me to live life earnestly, to remember what humans can be for each other."
Fair enough. And there are plenty of equally insightful entries in the anthology, each of which speaks clearly and well about the life of poetry in America. But this woman happens to be a bookstore manager, a person who's had both the opportunity and the inclination to read books and think about language.
And in fact, the more you look through "Americans' Favorite Poems," the more apparent it becomes that the majority of the people whose selections have been anthologized hail from fairly well-educated backgrounds. There are nurses and lawyers and doctors, librarians and teachers and professors, and there is a significant number of college and graduate students in the mix. No doubt this was caused at least in part by Pinsky's dual goal, "to represent the variety and interest of the letters received by the Favorite Poem Project while also making an anthology of literary interest." It's hard to make a literary anthology that doesn't rely to some degree on the tastes of well-educated people.
There are the requisite celebrity picks, but only two of them -- Laurie Anderson and the real Patch Adams, who chose poems by George Herbert and Walt Whitman, respectively. It's much to Pinsky and Dietz's credit that they steered clear of politicians and other big names. There is also a smattering of children, and their entries and explanations prove to be among the most charming and affecting in the book. After all, how could an anthology like this be complete without "Casey at the Bat," accompanied by this word of wisdom from an 11-year-old boy in Atlanta: "I play in Little League and I see this happen all the time." Or this comment, from an 11-year-old girl, about Shakespeare's "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day": "I could see a handsome young man reciting this poem to his true love, hoping that she would fall in love with him or go out on a date."
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").
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?/
