‘A Nation of Poets’ : Americans are an expressive lot. And they’re rediscovering that verse gives them free rein.

America demands a poetry that is bold, modern and all-surrounding and kosmical, as she is herself.

--Walt Whitman, in his essay

“Democratic Vistas” (1871)

*

It is Friday night and the poets are out among the people, doing Walt’s work.

Steve Kowit and Terry Hertzler are reading their poems at the Writing Center, a storefront operation in San Diego’s nightspot and tourism district called the Gaslamp Quarter. It is one of several poetry readings in San Diego this night.

Kowit is a pro: bard of innumerable liberal causes, a teacher, elfin, self-mocking, editor of a sassy volume of a no-intellectuals-need-apply poetry called “The Maverick Poets.” Possessed of a growing reputation, Kowit’s poetry is recommended by the poetry editor of New Yorker magazine.

The poems he reads celebrate the grit of an undocumented immigrant named Romero, mourn the death of a friend from AIDS, and play with the preposterous notion that Kowit was mistaken for the patrician-looking Richard Wilbur, who served a term as the nation’s poet laureate. Kowit mocks the Southern California zeal for exercise in “The Workout,” dedicated to the Family Fitness Center.

Not unlike the penitents of other sects

they are convinced that decades of decay

can be undone & that the more one genuflects

the less one rots--a doctrine

that has got the aged, the adipose & the misshapen

pedaling their stationary bikes

in such unholy fury. . . .

*

Hertzler, an unemployed technical writer, is coming to terms with the moral complexities of being a foot soldier in Vietnam. He reads his poems about going AWOL, about fearing that Vietnamese women at a coin laundry might be terrorists, and about his revulsion at being ordered to use his M-16 to kill a python that had crawled into a bunker.

From “The Way of the Snake,” the bearded and burly Hertzler reads:

I saw another snake die that year. But it was

a different kind of snake: man-made. The Huey

Cobra had been flying close-support that night,

and was just overhead when a rocket smashed it

from the sky.

*

The audience--verse lovers and versifiers, and some people who were just walking by and got curious--is intense and supportive. Admission is $3.

“Poetry is like theater in miniature,” said Dana Shutt, 25, a claims adjuster for an insurance company. “It tells a story and it gets to the point quickly.”

“I used to hate poetry,” said her companion, John Wiedenhoff, 32, also a claims adjuster. “But as I get older, I realize there is wisdom in poetry.”

“Poetry is a good way to end the week, to get grounded again,” said Sylvia Levinson, 57, a sales manager for the Old Globe Theatre in Balboa Park.

*

Alot of people in America are getting grounded with poetry these days.

More poetry is being read, written, critiqued and published than ever before. The number of weekend poetry seminars, poetry contests, poetry “slams” and open-microphone nights for poetry at coffeehouses and colleges is increasing exponentially.

Poetry sales at Barnes & Noble stores, the nation’s largest book retailer, have doubled in recent years, including both new poets and new editions of such literature-class warhorses as Tennyson and Shelley. Of the new poets, the biggest sellers are Maya Angelou, Rita Dove and Sandra Cisneros.

Small presses, journals and newsletters are publishing an army of heretofore unheard of poets: ethnic poets, Native American poets, rap poets, regional poets, cowboy poets, border poets, gay poets, Vietnam veteran poets, Persian Gulf veteran poets, wilderness poets, urban poets, language poets, love poets, anger poets, homeless poets, motherhood poets, men’s movement poets, women’s movement poets, children poets, sexual abuse survivor poets, and more and more.

The New York City Transit Authority, whose president is an amateur poet, has poems on display in 6,000 buses and subway cars as part of its “Poetry In Motion” program, including, naturally, Allen Ginsberg’s “Back on Times Square, Dreaming of Times Square.” The San Diego bus and trolley system has done likewise, with financial support from Pepsi. Other big city transit systems are interested.

Former President Jimmy Carter and Pope John Paul II have published slim volumes of poetry. In “Light Comes in Turkey Country,” Carter writes of a Zen-like meditation as he peers into the forest at the edge of his farm:

Distance takes the jagged edges off

the crows’ more raucous sound

and then perhaps, perhaps,

a far-off gobbler’s piercing call

ends all that reverie.

Thomas Grasso, a double killer, gifted the world with an original poem, “A Visit With Mystery,” just minutes before he was executed by lethal injection in March in Oklahoma. He also pressed into the warden’s hand a few lines copied from T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”:” . . . What we call the beginning is often the end, and to make an end is to make a beginning.”

At an emotional ceremony last month honoring Boston Celtics basketball player Reggie Lewis, his widow, Donna Harris-Lewis, riveted the audience with an original poem titled “Believe What Your Own Eyes See.” Her poem was meant to answer those who have suggested that her husband used cocaine: “Character is one thing that never dies / Let’s not believe these harmful lies.”

MTV has featured poets in its “Spoken Word Unplugged” and “Fightin’ Wordz” programs, and has sponsored a 19-city “Free Your Mind” tour for poets John S. Hall, Reg E. Gaines and Maggie Estep. Estep, whose poem about lost love rails at “that stupid jerk I’m obsessed with,” was on the cover of High Times magazine.

Wall Street executives are writing poetry. A candidate for the chief executive’s job at the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream company submitted an original poem with his resume and won the job.

The University of Illinois Press is publishing “For a Living: The Poetry of Work,” poems by business executives and others about the turmoil, drudgery and romance of the workplace. One poem tells of life as a short-order cook: “Pressure; responsibility; success / thirty cheeseburgers, thirty fries.”

Bill Moyers, his finger ever on the pulse of America, is preparing an eight-part series for the Public Broadcasting System centered on the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in New Jersey, a three-day poetry “happening” in which 90 poets read to an audience of 5,000. Doubleday is planning a companion volume for the series.

Poet-activist Bob Holman toured the country, including a stay in Los Angeles, filming poets for another upcoming PBS series, “The United States of Poetry.”

“It is a bull market for poetry,” said poet and critic J.D. McClatchy, poetry editor of the Yale Review and editor of “The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry.”

“It’s a renaissance, a true explosion,” said poet and teacher Grace Cavalieri, who interviews poets on a Washington-based radio show. “The old forms have broken down, and poetry has been democratized. American society has needed something new and suddenly it has rediscovered poetry.”

“We have become a nation of poets,” said Charles Simic, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and professor of English at the University of New Hampshire.

*

Just why has poetry become so popular? The question provokes as many differing views as the most allusion-laden poem by T.S. Eliot.

McClatchy, who views the boom with some critical alarm, points to a quintessentially American need for self-expression that has roots in the religiosity of the Colonials.

“Americans have always wanted to ‘witness,’ ” McClatchy said. “They seek to ‘testify,’ and there has never been more of that. There is a widespread need to validate one’s self. Poetry is a convenient way to do that.”

Mix the self-expression movement of the 1960s and the political Balkanization of the 1980s, and the result is a proliferation of once-marginalized groups that now see poetry as a sign of their empowerment.

“Suddenly poetry is a kind of entitlement,” said Cavalieri, who has interviewed 1,500 poets during the 17 years her program, “The Poet and the Poem,” has been on the air.

Long-held ideas about poetry needing rhyme and meter--ideas that were battered by the beat poets in the 1950s--have been demolished by the rock poets, the prose (or narrative) poets and others.

“The canon is opening up,” said John Kulka, chief poetry buyer for Barnes & Noble. “There is virtually no agreement about what constitutes poetry.”

Ray Gonzalez, poetry editor of the Denver-based Bloomsbury Review, said the spread of creative writing majors in colleges, and the increased use of poetry in schools, has broken down a cultural barrier.

“I don’t think people are as afraid to express themselves through language as they were in previous years,” said Gonzalez, a graduate student at Southwest Texas State College.

Other poetry watchers cite the influence of new immigrants, particularly from Latin and Asian countries, who arrive with their own traditions of public poetry and storytelling. Another influence is rap music.

“Rap music has, in its own strange way, done a great service to poetry,” said St. Louis poet Louis Daniel Brodsky. “Rap, once you really listen to it, is accessible. It’s given us lyrics, meter, cadence--and that’s poetry.”

Rap also teaches that street life is a fitting subject for artistic expression. Brodsky’s latest work is “The Capital Cafe: Poems of Redneck, U.S.A.,” poems based on his experiences as a traveling salesman and manager for a clothing manufacturer.

In his “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Grousing,” Brodsky provides a modern treatment to the Whitman poem:

The cradle of Midwestern civilization

Resides right here between State Highway AA

And the Lake of the Ozarks, 50 miles south.

Nearby, Osiris, in bib overalls, slouches.

*

Gary Snyder, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and charter member of the Beat Generation, finds in the poetry explosion a rejection of the impersonality of modern life.

“People are exhausted by television and mass media and the big-money hype of East Coast publishing,” said Snyder, who teaches poetry at the University of California, Davis. “Poetry is expanding because it is being done on a community scale and it is low-cost. . . . It’s a participatory activity, not passive.”

And then there is the chaos theory: that America is in a social and political mess and that poetry appears as an answer.

“Poetry has become a vehicle not just for self-expression but for making sense of this culture,” said Bob Perelman, a poet and English professor who teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania. “People are looking for an authoritative way for cultural intervention and poetry is very good for that.”

“With mass nations so commercialized, with such a stream of ugly images and words coming at us daily, people are turning to poetry to save their souls, to figure out what is important to them,” said Galway Kinnell, poet, Pulitzer Prize winner and professor at New York University, whose poems are displayed on subway trains in New York and trolleys in San Diego.

Or as Holman, co-editor of “Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe”--an anthology of poets, particularly Puerto Rican American poets, who have read at the famous cafe in New York--puts it:

“This country is in a state of emergency and we need to begin to listen to each other. What better, more natural place than by listening to the poet?”

Holman, in the manner of Whitman, sees the poets as the true leaders of America, spiritually if not politically.

“If we can accept great joy that language can bring, it will go a long way to accepting each other,” Holman said. “I’m a utopian. I’m a poet. What can I tell you?”

Of course, not all poets are prone to finding reasons why poetry is suddenly hot or suggesting that it will shape American society.

Cowboy poet Wally McCrae, who writes poetry between spells tending his 30,000-acre cattle ranch in Forsyth, Mont., believes in enjoying the ride while it lasts. The poetry boom is good for America, he said.

“It beats the hell out of sitcoms and morning talk shows,” said McCrae, whose works have been published in a collection called “Cowboy Curmudgeon.”

*

In San Diego, the poetry reading is at an end, and admirers surround Kowit and Hertzler.

The pair had kept their reading brief. Kowit, ever the joker, had even read a poem mocking long-winded poets: “The fellow reading poetry at us wouldnNothing could dissuade him. . . .”

After the session, books were bought and autographed. Some of those in attendance plan to enroll in Kowit’s poetry-writing workshop, “Shapely Phrases, Luminescent Perceptions.”

“Poetry is such a pure art,” said Will Boland, 38, a child counselor.

“People ask, ‘Why do you write poetry?’ ” said Levinson, the Old Globe sales manager. “I say, ‘Because I have to.’ ”