(HOST) April is National Poetry Month, and commentator and Vermont Humanities Council Executive Director Peter Gilbert has some thoughts about what keeps some people from reading poetry, how they can start, and why they should.
(GILBERT) The American poet William Carlos Williams wrote,
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Powerful lines. They’re even more powerful if you know that William Carlos Williams was a family physician; he was from Paterson, New Jersey, hardly an affluent town. He knew firsthand what people died from every day.
Now, note that Dr. Williams did not say that people are dying miserably because they weren’t reading poetry. (I expect that’s a relief to non-poetry readers.) What he said was that people are dying miserably every day because their lives lack what can be found in poetry: beauty, soul, meaning, emotion, ideas, powerful connections with important things and everyday things alike. In other words, the stuff that makes us human.
People are often intimidated by poetry; some find it hard to understand. Some have the sense that poems are full of Deep Hidden Meaning – DHM – and our job as readers is to ferret it out! Of course, some poetry is difficult, but much is not.
Many males – particularly boys – consider poetry a female domain, one that has nothing to say to them. But poetry has much to offer everyone. Sometimes male students need to be exposed to poems that rid them of that notion that poetry has cooties, that poetry is for wimps. They haven’t seen poems that really pack a punch, like Randall Jarrell’s poem "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," or Auden’s poem "Funeral Blues," or A.E. Housman’s "To an Athlete Dying Young," or Wilfred Owen’s poem about World War I, "Dolce et Decorum Est," or Robert Frost’s "Out, Out." Then, when they realize that maybe poems can speak to them, they’re open to other poems about other things, even love, beauty, and the power of everyday events.
There are lots of good collections of poetry for people who want to give it a try. Garrison Keillor has edited one, and you can also sign up on the web so you get his Writers Almanac poem emailed to you every day. If you don’t get a poem, read it more than once. If you don’t like it or still don’t get it, don’t worry about it; move on. After all, some paintings in a museum you like more than others, and some paintings, I confess, I don’t get at all. The same is true for poems.
I’m pleased to say that poetry is making something of a comeback in this country, thanks to Garrison Keillor, rap music, slam poetry, some innovative projects by national poet laureates, and countless other factors. The key thing, Dr. William Carlos Williams might argue, is that we all somehow – somewhere find in our lives the power and passion, the beauty and meaning, that can be found in poetry.