This year, National Poetry Month sometimes feels like Poetry Day or Poetry Hour or Poetry Minute to me . . . in a good way. The leisurely websiteseeing helicopter has been replaced by jet speed.
As I write this column on my laptop, I keep glancing over at my iMac screen like an edgy air traffic controller monitoring takeoffs and landings ("Seamus Heaney, climb and maintain 15,000; Cavafy, you're cleared to land on runway 27 left"). Twitter updates are scrolling by and poetry-themed Tweets take virtual flight in 140 characters or less:
- @FSG_Books notes that Jonathan Galassi has written about Susan Wheeler's new collection, Assorted Poems.
- @NewDirections offers thoughts on this Christian Bok Tweet: "Poetry is not language at play, but language out of work, deliberately unemployed--thus poetry commits a kind of welfare fraud upon us all."
- @FaberBooks exclaims: "Wow, just got treated to Seamus Heaney reading in our offices! Don't worry, we've filmed it and will share it with you all soon."
- @AAKnopf's Poem-A-Day is "On the Jetty" by C. P. Cavafy (and shortly after giving us that link, @AAKnopf ReTweets @ConnieAnnKirk's discovery: a video of Sean Connery reciting Cavafy's "Ithaca" to music by Vangelis).
- @norton_fiction introduces the latest in Robert Pinsky's Poems Out Loud series: "I Love You, Man. Paul Rudd has nothing on Fulke Greville's poem 'Elegy for Philip Sidney.'"
- @RichRennicks shares a "great website celebrating Seamus Heaney's 70th birthday."
- @joebfoster notes that his "favorite book o' poetry to handsell" is New European Poets, edited by Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer.
It's a stressful environment being a Twitter traffic controller, so I switch to the more leisurely pace of e-mails (the new snail mail) and some responses to last week's column.
Penny McConnel, co-owner of the Norwich Bookstore, Norwich, Vt., wrote, "We have an annual poetry month event when people bring a poem or two to read; either their own or a favorite written by someone else. The audience ranges from kids to oldsters and everyone loves the event. We start getting inquiries in January checking to make sure it will happen again."
On April 16, Chapter One Book Store, Hamilton, Mont., is hosting "a 'Poetry Out Loud' night," noted co-owner Russ Lawrence, adding that the event is "particularly targeted at high school students but open to all. Read or recite a short piece, our judges will render their verdicts based on interpretation, passion, and whatever random factors enter into it. There are real, published rules for events like this, but I think we’ll mostly just make it up!"
Steve Scolca, who is a bookseller as well as manager of Internet marketing at Norton, sent a "Dispatch to the Poetry Month Website-seeing Helicopter" highlighting the publisher's "Poetry Month Bonanza," including "What Is Poetry For?" which was filmed at the AWP Conference in Chicago in February and features 11 poets answering that primary question.
Then I decide to abandon technology altogether for memory and confession. Maybe I'll call this the iPoem section. I've spent enough cash in Apple stores in recent years to permit momentary borrowing of the sacred "i."
Debates about the merits of confessional poetry are ongoing and probably unending, but since I'm not a poet, I can change the focus slightly and introduce another concept: confessional reading of poetry.
Here's my Poetry Month confession. In the late 1960s, during my sophomore year in college, I took a creative writing course. For the first class, the instructor asked us to bring in books by our three favorite poets. I chose John Berryman and Theodore Roethke (to whom I'd been introduced the previous term) and Rod McKuen. Yes, that Rod McKuen. The class response was brutal. I'm surprised I ever read another poem by anybody.
Shortly afterward, I discovered Gary Snyder's Riprap, & Cold Mountain Poems and my career as a poetry reader was back on its flight path. Now I know that altitude--as well as attitude--is relative.
Setting websiteseeing helicopters and Twitter traffic controllers aside for a moment, I celebrate Poetry Month this week with the deceptive simplicity of Gary Snyder's closing lines from "Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout":
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
Later in the day, we fly again as @AAKnopf ReTweets @mcnallyjackson: "We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars."--Jack Gilbert, "Tear It Down."--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)