Poetry comes to our rescue -- April 7, 2022 column

By MARSHA MERCER

After Black History Month in February and Women’s History Month in March, April brings us National Poetry Month.

One could argue that Black and women’s history, as well as poetry, should be observed all year long, not just for one month, but clustering events over about 30 days does help draw attention to subjects we might otherwise forget.

I figured National Poetry Month was celebrated in April because it was Shakespeare’s birth month or because of T.S. Eliot’s opening line in The Wasteland, “April is the cruellest month . . .”

They probably didn’t hurt, but the Academy of American Poets says Black and women’s history months were the inspiration for National Poetry Month in 1996 to remind people “that poets have an integral role to play in our culture and that poetry matters.”

The academy, despite its governmental-sounding name, is a charitable, membership organization. Marie Bullock was just 23 when she started the academy in her New York apartment in 1934 after studying in France, where she was impressed with the prominent role poets play in French culture.  

We’re always hearing that poetry may be dead, but miraculously it survives.

A 2017 survey by the National Endowment for the Arts, the most recent survey, found 12% of adults had read poetry in the previous year. That sounds paltry but was hailed as encouraging news as it meant 28 million adults actually read a poem, and 12% was the highest share of the population to read poetry in 15 years.

Poetry got a boost from President Joe Biden’s inauguration. When Amanda Gorman, a 23-year-old black woman, read her stunning poem, “The Hill We Climb,” at the inauguration – was that only last year? – she became a cultural icon, proving that poetry is alive, vibrant and, yes, cool.

A collection of her poems, “Call Us What We Carry,” was published last December and became a New York Times bestseller.

National Poetry Month has become “the largest literary celebration in the world,” says the academy, which offers resources for celebrating poetry at home or in the classroom on www.poets.org.

These include 30 activities, such as writing a poem, checking out an e-book of poetry from your local library, buying a book of poetry at your local bookstore, and signing up for a Poem-a-Day.

If you’re wondering why bother or what poetry can do for you, Joy Harjo, the Poet Laureate of the United States, has an answer:

“Poetry can make someone fall in love with you. Poetry can make you fall in love with yourself,” Harjo says in the trailer for her online MasterClass on poetic thinking. If that doesn’t make people want to read and write poetry, what will?

Harjo, the first Native American Poet Laureate in U.S. history, will wrap up her third and final year in the post this month with several events to be livestreamed on the Library of Congress’ YouTube channel and Facebook page.

For her signature project, she created “LivingNations, Living Words,” an online presentation and interactive map, to introduce the work of 47 Native Nations poets. 

If ever we needed poetry, now is the time. With so much horrible news bombarding us, poetry can be a solace on the page, online or on social media.

People turn to poetry to help make sense of the pandemic, isolation, war and other stresses.

A hopeful prose poem Kitty O’Meara, a retired teacher and chaplain, wrote during the first pandemic lockdown in March 2020 and posted for a small group of her Facebook friends went viral. It begins:

And the people stayed home.

And read books and listened, and rested and exercised,

And made art and played games,

And learned new ways of being and were still.

And listened more deeply.

While some grumpy readers complained O’Meara’s poem reflects a privileged, fantasy view of the earliest lockdown, it rang true with many others. It was turned into a picture book and an operatic solo which Renee Fleming sang and was published in an anthology of pandemic poems.

We can all be grateful for poets as we celebrate poetry this month – and every month.

© 2022 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

 

 

 

If only the 2016 campaign could rise to poetry -- April 7, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

It’s National Poetry Month, so let us praise politicians who campaign in poetry in 2016.

Anyone . . . Anyone?

In the 1980s, Mario Cuomo could say without irony: “You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.”

Obviously, Cuomo couldn’t have imagined today’s presidential contest when he made the distinction between the lofty words that inspire voters and the gritty compromises needed to make policy.

In January, the prospects for poetry in the campaign looked promising. When Bernie Sanders launched his brilliant ad using Simon and Garfunkel’s “America,” Hillary Clinton said she loved it.

“We need a lot more poetry in this campaign and in our country,” she told Chris Cuomo of CNN at a Democratic town hall in Iowa. “So I applaud that. I love the feeling. I love the energy.”

The feel-good feeling didn’t last. The campaign soon devolved from poetry to a coarse limerick.

Rare in 2016 is the presidential candidate who appeals to what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. Two exceptions: Democrat Martin O’Malley, who was given to recitations of Irish poetry, and Republican John Kasich, who stays more cheerful than combative in a campaign marked by insults, anger and ridicule.

We know how far quoting Eavan Boland by heart took O’Malley. We’ll see whether Kasich can parlay civility and thoughtfulness into anything higher than third place. Donald J. Trump’s wordsmithing begins and ends with taunts --“Lyin’ Ted,” meet “Low-energy Jeb.”

It wasn’t always like this.

“Our nation’s first great politicians were also among the nation’s first great writers and scholars,” then-Sen. John F. Kennedy recounted in a 1956 commencement address at Harvard, his alma mater. “Books were their tools, not their enemies.” He himself won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1957 for “Profiles in Courage.”

Americans’ appreciation for poetry is reflected in the fact that 42 states and the federal government have poets laureate.

The Virginia state Senate in February invited Virginia poet laureate James Ronald Smith, who teaches at St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, to read a poem on the Senate floor.

Margaret Britton Vaughn received a lifetime appointment as Tennessee’s poet laureate in 1996. Alabama poet laureate Andrew Glaze died in February at the age of 95.

The term of the U.S. poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera ends in May. Several presidents, starting with JFK, have invited poets to read at their inaugurations.

We celebrate National Poetry Month because the American Academy of Poets decided in 1996 that poetry should have its own month the way black history and women’s history do. It’s grown into the largest literary celebration in the world, the academy says.

At a poetry month celebration at the White House last April, President Barack Obama said: “The greatness of a country is not just the size of its military, or the size of its economy, or how much territory it controls. It’s also measured by the richness of its culture.”

And, Obama said, “If you want to understand America, then you better read some Walt Whitman. If you want to understand America, you need to know Langston Hughes.”

The Library of Congress website has a Presidents as Poets area with information on eight presidents who wrote poetry at some point in their lives, starting with George Washington’s “anguished love poems,” through Obama. Obama had two poems published in the literary magazine at Occidental College when he was an undergraduate.

Asked by The New Yorker in 2007 to evaluate Obama’s work, the estimable Yale literary critic Harold Bloom said one poem was “not bad – a good enough folk poem with some pathos and humor and affection.”

Bloom was less charitable toward published poet Jimmy Carter, calling him, “literally the worst poet in the United States.”

In his 1956 commencement speech, JFK told a story about an English mother who wrote her son’s school: “Don’t teach my boy poetry; he is going to stand for Parliament.”

“Well, perhaps she was right,” Kennedy said, “but if more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place to live.”

I agree, but we need not wait for the politicians. April 21 is Poem in Your Pocket Day, when people find a poem they love and carry it with them to share. What’s yours?

©2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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