Each year I write a National Poetry Month commentary for KUAC, our NPR affiliate. This year the commentary is my post Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking. To honor the month of verse, here’s one I recorded a few years ago.
It’s April, and that means it’s National Poetry Month. Here in Fairbanks it’s also Garbage Month. After a winter suspended in snow, all the doll heads, old computers, and cardboard boxes that jumped off our pickups on the way to the dump have begun to surface from under the snow. It seems that poets appear magically in the melting snow here as well. They’re reading, they’re slamming, they’re writing editorials telling us how important poetry is. Poetry every April is the literary equivalent of hay fever.
As a culture we treat poetry like the kid our moms made us invite to the birthday party for the sake of politeness. We give him a little month–a little cake–because it’s the right thing to do. We may pat ourselves on the backs for being so nice, but our smile is forced as we accept the brightly wrapped sonnet he brought. The other eleven months most of us don’t pay poor little poetry any mind.
We seem to have poetry-phobia. We Alaskans even paid poetry the disrespect of demotion by canning our poet laureate position and replacing it with the bland title “state writer.” Even though poetry slams and spoken word have done much to widen poetry’s audience in the past 10 years, poets still seem to outnumber readers of poetry. We stereotype poetry as something only the unemployable do, with their coffee, and berets, and trashy studio apartments. Or worse, as something only professors do. We treat poetry as if it’s invisible.
I would venture that it’s not that poetry is invisible. It’s transparent. Like air, it’s so present that we cease to notice it. Even though we breathe it, and hear it, and speak it everyday, we don’t recognize it.
In creative writing classes I’ve taught, I’ve witnessed our collective denial firsthand. I’ve heard teenagers who have hundreds of song lyrics memorized say they hate poetry. Somehow they didn’t notice lyrics are a form of poetry. Outside of class, I’ve also heard religious folks deride the art of verse, apparently forgetting the power of the “Song of Solomon.” Any of us who have whispered prayers or meditations have participated in poems. Even the catchy jingles corporations ply us with endlessly are forms, if awful ones, of poetry. The fact that doggerel sticks in our minds is proof of its power. And most of us, with glee, can lovingly recite at least part of “Green Eggs and Ham.” Let’s just admit it–deep down we love poetry, we just name it something different. And isn’t that what all poets do–write about love, or death, and name it something different?
Poetry may not change everyone’s life, but it can inspire. One night after I read at a poetry slam at the Fly-By-Night Club in Anchorage, I was approached by Jeff. Waving a crumpled twenty, he told me he loved my poems and that he wanted to support the arts. I tried not to take it, but he ended by dropping the cash into my gin and tonic, hugging me and walking away. Ahhh, the Medici of Spenard. That’s a powerful response to poetry.
Poetry doesn’t eat paste, or have bad breath. In fact, poetry is known to swear a lot, talk about sex, and hang with people our parents warned us about–that usually makes you popular on the more dangerous playgrounds.
My advice–admit you love poetry and do more than enjoy it through osmosis. Stop being an amoeba. Go read a book of poems, but give poetry its proper respect and do it in May, June, or July. Better yet, do it in January when all the garbage in Fairbanks is stratified under layers of snow, it’s forty below, and a good aurora is swirling above your roof. You might find something beautiful, or dangerous, or powerful. Why wait until spring to see what the sun reveals. Find it yourself by digging in the dark–that’s what poets do.
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