Good old newspaper, especially a real one, made of paper; you can spread it out, browse and move on. You can get the gist of the news with your coffee. Then you stumble on this lump of writing, a column on poetry. Philosophical, even. Oh dear. Hurry by this one.
For those of you still with me, note that April is National Poetry Month. Christian Wiman, the editor of the prestigious Poetry magazine, reminds us that if poetry were truly integrated into this culture, we wouldn't need a month to proclaim how important it is. Naming a special month, he says, is like applying paddles to try to save a failing heart.
Actually, though, he says, poetry itself is the paddles, the means to jolt us out of our bad habits. What does he mean by that? He means that poetry requires and feeds an inner life.
Inner life? Our culture is designed to fill every moment with visuals. And images can't escape the present tense. Their "presentness" is their strength. They hold us like nothing else can. But this is also their weakness. For the most part, they lack interiority, depth and density.
Still with me? I'm not talking about art images. I'm talking about videos, TV and movies. I'm talking about our lives filled with almost nothing but those. They bind us together in such a uniform way.
In the extreme, if we live only in images, in our heads, we begin to think of life as occurring only in the present tense. Forget guilt, forget scandals. Move on. This can make us capable of the most awful and self-destructive acts.
Slow words, on the other hand, hold history and a sense of the future inside themselves. Each word has a history. It has a clear meaning, with subtle differences that require a relationship between interior and exterior worlds to be understood.
And poetry? How is it different from other writing? In many ways, but one of the greatest pleasures of poetry is the experience of a truly individual voice. Strangely, when we experience another's individuality, we discover our own.
Around this time of year, those who talk about poetry at all often talk about its "relevance to life," meaning the life we've all agreed is true. But the greatest power of poetry may be the wild, individual voice that's nothing like what we've thought of as life, before.
And about this time of year, those who talk about poetry at all will complain that a poem should be easy to understand, or why bother? But when we dumb poetry down, pretty soon we've eliminated the possibility of the deep engagement with the sometimes seemingly intractable language, which can change us.
What can you do for National Poetry Month? You've already read this whole column. That's a good start. Next, you might pick up a poem that you find difficult and off-putting, but something about it draws you. You can read slowly and carefully, paying attention to what its punctuation tells you, what its line-endings tell you. You can look up words you don't know. You can reread it until it begins to give itself to you and widens the space inside you that makes you who you are.
Fleda Brown, of Traverse City, is professor emerita, University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware. You can learn more about her on her Web site, fledabrown.com.
Print this story
E-mail this story
