A gift from the government. Really. -- Dec. 20, 2018 column

By MARSHA MERCER

If the frenzied pace of life and the blitz of breaking news have left you desperate for a time out, there’s help from an unlikely source: the federal government.

Tracy K. Smith, the poet laureate of the United States, has a new podcast.

I hear you: “Oh, great, another podcast. Just what we need.” But wait. “The Slowdown” invites us to do just that every weekday – slow down.

It’s only five minutes, and you don’t have to be an English major to enjoy the experience.  

Smith starts each episode with a thoughtful meditation on something she has done or seen that connects to the poem she then reads. Her voice is calm and friendly, her insights are engaging and the poems she chooses are conversational and unfussy.

“The Slowdown” is a counterpoint to the constant clash and clang of everyday life. It provides a pause, time to step outside ourselves and think about something we normally wouldn’t.

“Life is fast, intense and sometimes bewildering. But poetry offers a way of slowing things down, looking at them closely, mining each moment for all it houses,” Smith said when announcing the podcast. It launched Nov. 26 and will air on public radio stations starting next month.

I was among journalists who interviewed Smith by phone last year soon after Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden appointed her the nation’s 22^nd poet laureate. I wondered if she was up to the post that’s been held by such distinguished poets as Robert Frost and Rita Dove.  

But Smith has proved to be an able poetry advocate, taking poems to rural places through her American Conversations tour and using today’s technology to summon us to “see the world more clearly through poetry.”

The poet laureate receives a $35,000 stipend and $5,000 travel budget annually, but, no, this is not your tax dollars at work.

The position is funded through a private endowment that established the Library of Congress Poetry and Literature Center in 1937 and contributions, as they say, from people like you. The podcast is sponsored by the Poetry Foundation, based in Chicago, and supported by the center.

The poet laureate post was officially called Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress until 1985, when Congress dreamed up the clunky title Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Robert Penn Warren served under both titles, 1944-45 and 1986-87.

Smith, 46, earned a B.A. from Harvard and a master’s in creative writing from Columbia. She teaches at Princeton and is the author of four books of poetry and a memoir.

She won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for “Life on Mars,” which the Pulitzer jury called “A collection of bold, skillful poems, taking readers into the universe and moving them to an authentic mix of joy and pain.”

The poet laureate is not political, and Smith believes poetry can bring people together.

“I dreamed of using poetry as a way of building a bridge between people in cities and university towns, where poetry festivals and reading series are quite common, and those in rural parts of the United States, where such programming doesn’t often reach,” she wrote in a blog post.

“Because poems put us in touch with our most powerful memories, feelings, questions and wishes, I imagined that talking about poems might be a way of leaping past small-talk and collapsing the distance between strangers,” she wrote.

Her travels to New Mexico, Kentucky, South Carolina, Alaska, South Dakota, Maine and Louisiana have included stops to read and talk about poetry at libraries, community centers, a veterans’ home and a women’s prison.

She edited “American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time,” an anthology with work by 50 living American poets, published in the fall.

“Poetry invites us to listen to other voices, to make space for other perspectives, and to care about the lives of others who may not look, sound or think like ourselves,” she said.

So spend five minutes with “The Slowdown.” Let me know where it takes you.  

© 2018 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Not dead, poetry due for a comeback -- Sept. 14, 2017 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Have you read a poem in the past year? If so, you’re in the minority.

Just seven in 100 Americans read poetry even once in the past 12 months, government figures show, down from 17 percent in 1992.  

“Poetry is going extinct,” a headline in The Washington Post lamented in 2015, after the 2012 statistics, the latest available, were released.

But wait. Sometimes called the Cinderella of literary forms, poetry isn’t dead; it’s not even asleep.

I won’t go as far as a British newspaper, which earlier this year heralded a “genuine renaissance” in poetry in the United Kingdom. But, in the United States, poetry, like an endangered species that’s been protected, is showing signs of life.

Poetry Out Loud programs in all 50 states invite students in grades 9 through 12 to compete in contests by memorizing and reciting poetry. The Library of Congress this year named the first national youth poet laureate.

A new book, “Why Poetry,” urges people to stop thinking of a poem as a riddle or code to crack and read what the words say to them.

“Like classical music, poetry has the unfortunate reputation for requiring special training and education to appreciate, which makes us feel (unnecessarily) as if we haven’t studied enough to read it,” Matthew Zapruder, a poet and former poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine, writes in “Why Poetry.”

Tracy K. Smith is the new poet laureate of the United States, the 22^nd in a line of literary legends that includes Robert Frost, Richard Wilbur and Rita Dove. Dove also served as poet laureate of Virginia and holds the Commonwealth chair at the University of Virginia.

The author of three books of poetry, Smith, 45, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2012. Her 2015 memoir, “Ordinary Light,” was a finalist for the National Book Award. She and her husband, Raphael Allison, a literary scholar, teach at Princeton University and have three children.  

Smith said a few months ago that as poet laureate she would take poetry beyond the ivy walls of universities and urban literary festivals to places where it is seldom heard or read. She received invitations from communities struggling with addiction as well as from nursing homes, hospitals and hospices.

“Nursing homes are often overlooked” when we think of poetry, she said in a telephone interview Wednesday, before her inaugural reading at the Library of Congress. “Poetry can be very useful at the end of life.”

The U.S. poet laureate, who is chosen by the Librarian of Congress, has few duties beyond fostering a national appreciation of the reading and writing poetry. And, if you’re wondering, no, this is not a case of your tax dollars at work.

The poet laureate’s stipend is privately funded through an endowment created in 1936 by Archer M. Huntington, a philanthropist whose mother was from Richmond. Among Huntington’s many gifts was the money to start the Mariner’s Museum in Newport News.

The title originally was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. In 1985, Congress changed it to Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.

When he had the job in 1963, Howard Nemerov was only half joking, the library says in a history, when he wrote, “The Consultant in Poetry is a very busy man, chiefly because he spends so much time talking with people who want to know what the Consultant in Poetry does.”

For Smith, who still remembers the thrill of discovering Emily Dickinson in fifth grade, her job will be to make poetry less stressful and more enjoyable.

“People have anxiety about poetry,” she said. They see a poem as an object “that must be analyzed to death to be enjoyed or understood.”

But there’s no need to feel obliged to wrestle hidden meaning from poems. Plus, who couldn’t benefit from taking a few minutes from our busy, tech- and information-overloaded days to let poetry speak to us?

“Poems teach us how to read them,” Smith says. So, when her students read a poem for the first time, she starts with a simple question: “What do you notice?”

It’s a good question, one I plan to ask myself more often – and not only when I’m reading a poem.   

© 2017 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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