Old-School Poetry

With the month of April come rain, taxes….and poetry. Relatively few of us pay much heed, but April is indeed National Poetry Month. It’s hard to say–given the scant population of Americans who actually take poetry seriously–whether the month-long celebration is noble or a little ridiculous.

To be honest, I dabble in creative writing and, for brief moments, have actually dreamed of trying to hack it as a poet. I’m not opposed to poetry on the subway or chapbooks in the park—yet these annual efforts to spread poetry to the masses almost feel like a concession: The poets and their MFA grad programs have tried, sighed, and lost their cultural spunk. Or maybe all those MFA programs are part of the problem.

In his famous 1991 Atlantic essay, Dana Gioia, the very good poet and former chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts opined:

American Poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. As a class poets are not without cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible.

You have to admire the poets and their readers, even as they become more and more cloistered. Goia goes on to observe that the slow demise of national poetry actually coincides with an “unprecedented expansion of the art,” with more and more journals, anthologies, and university residencies available to aspiring writers. This is likely where we’ve gone awry. It’s harder, as a culture, for us to sort the mediocre, the good and the great—so we quarantine all wannabe poets in fringe urban coffee shops and pray they won’t harangue the rest of us.

This week, the conservative essayist Joseph Epstein mocked National Poetry Month in the Wall Street Journal as foolish enough for April 1:

In the room the poets come and go, / muttering, yo!, / where’s the prize and what’s the dough? But if I ask a literary gent or lady to quote me a single line or phrase from any of our putative major poets, they cannot do it. The magazines—the TLS, the New Yorker, Poetry and the rest—go on publishing the stuff, prize committees meet to issue awards and descant on the importance of poetry to civilization, but it is all finally an intramural game.

Like so many people of my rapidly diminishing generation, I walk around with lines and entire passages from the poetry of W.B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, e.e. cummings, and others rattling around pleasantly in my head. But nearly all the poetry written since the years those poets wrote doesn’t register, resonate, ring, do any of the elevating things that poetry is supposed to, and once indeed did, do.

Unlike Epstein, I don’t wander around with that much memorized verse in my head. I’m probably his vision of that tongue-tied literary lady. I love to read and analyze poetry—and Eliot, Frost, and Stevens leave me with a certain residual mood long after I’ve closed their works. But I have almost none of the “Greats” memorized. Part of this is surely my fault—I could memorize more if I prioritized it, and perhaps, if I ever teach poetry, I’ll live with poems long enough that they really will start to slip off the tongue.

But I also can’t help but associate some of this with my 21st century education and the overemphasis on getting school-kids to “express themselves” before they’ve really experienced the timeless expressions of others. We’ve cheapened what it means to be a culturally iconic writer to the point that every third grader is a “poet” but virtually no one is a reader of poetry.

One older high school English teacher of mine insisted we all memorize Edgar Allen Poe’s “To Helen” and recite it before the class, for no other reason than that it was a famous poem—and it might help the guys “woo women” later in life.  We loved it. We shouted it on the school bus. We performed interpretive dances.

Our sheer excitement over this one allusion to “To the beauty that was Greece/ And the grandeur that was Rome” proved just how old-fashioned the lesson plan was. It had never occurred to us that we could commit literature to memory.

So my goal for National Poetry Month is a fairly humble and traditional one. I’m going to memorize a poem.