“Does poetry matter?” is a question without...

“Does poetry matter?” is a question without an answer, but that hasn’t stopped poets (and just about everyone else) from taking a stab at one. It is a query that trails, like the Sphinx’s eternal riddle, a venerable answer-history: from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s grandiose “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” to Marianne Moore’s “I too dislike it” to Jimmy Santiago Baca’s impassioned “Poetry can save you.” The issue of poetry’s relevance seems to matter greatly to many people.

Some critics suggest that contemporary poets have lost touch with what makes poetry Poetry, while others find formal poetic traditions and practices to be a kind of elitism. The suspicion of both sides is that poetry has somehow betrayed its own origins. Ironically, despite the anti-democratic implications of this charge, we live in a time, as Bill Moyers puts it, of a nationwide “poetry revival.” There is a tsunami of poetry popularity: ubiquitous writing workshops, huge poetry conferences, poetry on video, poetry on film (W.H. Auden and Pablo Neruda each “starred” in recent movies) and poetry therapy.

Despite this explosion of interest, the sobering reality seems to be that while a great many people are writing poetry, not many are reading it. At the same time that Moyers’ ratings soar, many publishers find themselves (with a few notable exceptions) facing anemic poetry sales. Case in point: A small-press publisher announces a poetry contest (with a prize of book publication) and receives thousands of submissions. Meanwhile, the publishers’ average sales for poetry books hover around 500 copies.

In my own experience, poetry can be democratic and quasi-revivalist and still excite passion for reading. As a graduate student in 1969, I recall joining in a poem-cheer (“S-T-R-I-K-E”) led by poet Denise Levertov from a stage at San Francisco State, as students waved copies of her poems. Years later, I heard Amiri Baraka (previously known as Leroi Jones), a fellow professor in the Columbia University graduate writing program, dare his students to “go down and read your poems at 116th and Broadway and see what happens.” (Amazingly, students did. People listened, argued, offered criticism, including a few Bronx cheers.) On a recent reading visit to West Point, I found cadets hard at work reading and analyzing contemporary poems. The poetry program’s founder expressed the belief that cultivated sensitivity to language and literature may better equip an officer to make life-and-death decisions on the battlefield. I’ve taught poetry everywhere from Riker’s Island to the Iowa Writers Workshop and found that student desires are the same: to write poems as amazing as the ones they’ve read.

Allen Ginsberg’s recent death silenced a poetic voice of supreme relevance. His epic poem “Howl” changed the face of American poetry, the face of the culture itself. Among his many heirs (though obviously not in the lessons of nonviolence) are our beleaguered rap artists, whose rhyming cadences fill the airwaves and whose blistering concerns spark public controversy.

Still, even with all this evidence that it matters, I find myself persuaded by Auden’s famous observation that “Poetry makes nothing happen.” I believe that what Auden meant was that poetry is not Friday night in the mosh pit or a quesadilla with Aunt Bertie or the 5:10 to Poughkeepsie--or any other temporal event. Poetry, at its deepest level, changes nothing: It simply is. Or, poetry changes nothing except what happens inside the mind, in memory. Troy was destroyed, but how we envision its destruction remains with us courtesy of Homer. Poetry, as Auden insinuated, is timeless and yet crucial to our understanding of ourselves.

Poetry, whether one reads it or recites it or writes it, is an act of the mind. And like reading, it makes nothing happen. A poet, or any other reader, arrives at the gate of language and waits for a great soundless parade--unseen and unheard in the audible and visible world--to pass. Readers make nothing happen: They only witness, say, John Clare’s desperate badger hunted down for cruel sport or see “Julia” in her silks and the “liquefaction of her clothes.” They help create the sick rose, the London chimney sweep, the cry of the turtledove, the lovers in hell blown about in an eternal wind. They read lines written in the Tower prior to dawn execution, hear (in their mind’s ear) chants for a corn dance, marvel at the Pleiades setting over a Greek isle, watch young boys “thinning gin” in a pool hall. (Precursors of today’s rappers, Gwendolyn Brooks’ pool-hall buddies croon “We real cool” and “We lurk late.”) Nothing happens when Emily Dickinson’s “loaded gun” is pointed at us and not a single event occurs but in the mind’s eye as it re-creates spinning gyres, a deaf falcon and the terrible rough beast, different in each solitary reincarnation commencing its slouch toward God’s cradle.

Nothing happens as the imagination eavesdrops on the great conversation that is poetry, voices echoing and answering each other over the gulf of time and history. Paul Laurence Dunbar’s anguished claim, “I know why the caged bird sings” (from his poem “Sympathy”) is echoed in Maya Angelou’s homage. Or Buson, the 18th century haiku master (“Coolness / the sound of the bell / as it leaves the bell”), resurrected in the voice of the 20th century poet Wallace Stevens: “Among twenty snowy mountains / the only moving thing / was the eye of the blackbird.” Or Native American poet Adrian C. Louis echoing the chants of his ancestors on a South Dakota reservation strewn with beer cans and bingo ads. Or Ginsberg “answering” William Blake on his harmonium.

It is not necessary to be educated or to have read through a library or two in order to love poetry, to be moved by it, to find it as necessary as breathing. The power and influence of oral poetry in culture throughout the world is inarguable. Poetry is rooted in the sound of the speaking voice. I first encountered poetry in the voice of my mother, who grew up in a generation that learned things by heart. She would push me on a swing in the backyard, all the while reciting such lines as “How would you like to go up in a swing? Up in the air so blue” or “Sunset and evening star and one clear call for me / Let there be no moaning of the bar when I put out to sea. . . .” I knew instantly that I was swinging inside the elastic lines of those poems, drawn out and then back within the embrace of a shape made by pattern and tonality. I was flying, yet I felt safe.

Hearing poetry seems to create a further longing in us, a longing for language that is an act in itself. A desire for reading, for the light of consciousness on the signs by which we communicate. A performance may underscore poetry’s emotive power, but poetry is not mere performance, or acting, or accompaniment. The music of poetry must be heard in the line itself. Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, speaks of “that moment when the bird sings very close / To the music of what happens.” It is a moment just long enough--and close enough--to make us hear that soundless music within and to feel the silence in which the poem speaks to us.

Reading Wallace Stevens’ extraordinary poem “Of Modern Poetry” many years ago, I understood how the “ear” in poetry is connected to the mind. Stevens describes the poet as an “insatiable actor” on stage, “a metaphysician in the dark,” who tries, with a kind of Zen radar, to “weigh” the words he has to say, words that he hears and tries out “in the innermost ear of the mind,” words that “will suffice.” Suffice for what? And for whom? The answer is clear: words that will suffice for themselves, in the mind’s ear where the lineaments of human desire are heard and said. Stevens’ actor is on stage nowhere but in his own mind. There is no audience, no spotlight, no applause. There is only the sound of the imagination listening, as Stevens says, to “sounds passing through sudden rightnesses,” and the resulting poem is “of a man skating, a woman dancing . . . / . . . The poem of the act of the mind.”

Poetry has many subjects: love, hate, loss, politics, war, domestic life. But none of these topics and the way poets treat them (though they may move us to tears or rage or ecstasy) reveal why poetry itself matters. William Stafford’s poem “Traveling Through the Dark” tells us why. A man finds a deer dead by the side of a dangerously narrow mountain road. He discovers to his shock and wonder that the deer is a doe--a pregnant doe--and that the fawn is still alive inside her. Darkness closes in on him and the deer, encircles them in the lighted shape created by the beam of his headlights. He “thinks hard for us all,” his “only swerving,” before he does what he decides to do. The poem is filled with intimations of how we regard--indeed, define--life and death. Here is the universe in the lit circle of an unsparing spotlight. It is the illuminated space in which we see ourselves and the choices that are thrust upon us. What is key is not the “issue” or “topic” or ostensible “subject” of the poem but the heartbreaking attempt to understand, the “thinking hard for us all,” thinking as alien and familiar as nature itself.

Czeslaw Milosz resays it as “I ask not in sorrow, but in wonder.” And also Sylvia Plath when she cries out: “The blood jet is poetry . . . you hand me two children, two roses.”

The blood jet is poetry. Poetry matters and always will precisely because it doesn’t. Because it is no-thing, protean, and defies definition. Imagine the poem itself out of a job (no more readers, alas), hanging around the unemployment office, flyblown, bothering people with its signature line breaks, its once-famous capacity for enjambment. Rusty on the lyre, reeking of cheap Dionysian wine. People walk by, look away embarrassed. One or two, perhaps, stop and listen to the poem, pick it up, scan a line or two. They discover the mystery and incantatory magic of its words. Let’s call the poem “It Doesn’t Matter.” And lo and behold! It somehow transforms itself before our eyes into a skylark on the wing, a Japanese courtesan, a bomber pilot, a cat, a panther, a headless torso of Apollo, an African mask, a cherry blossom floating down the river to Li Po. The poem remains--when all is said and done--utterly irrelevant. And immortal.