The Road Worth Taking

April is National Poetry Month, what’s left of it--that is, what’s left of April, and what’s left of poetry.

Precious little, you’d think, in a world that makes demigods of rancid TV and radio vulgarians, but fidgets and blushes at the authentic bare-heartedness of a poem. Better you should be caught reading Hustler than Langston Hughes. Maybe I could be sent off to a re-education camp for preferring e.e. cummings to “E.R.”

I’ve always had it bad. When other little girls kept pictures of Paul and Ringo, I kept one of Rupert Brooke, the World War I poet. Sure he’s cute, my friends said, but he’s, like, dead.

Then, this week, in the waning days of National Poetry Month, I witnessed an actual poetry emergency. Damn the consequences--I had to do something.

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Such is the desolation of jury waiting rooms, like this one in the downtown Criminal Courts Building, that you think you’ve stepped off the elevator onto the jail floor by mistake.

They share a withering boredom, jail and jury rooms, and veteran jurors know to amuse themselves or be left to the mercies of reading matter others have left behind. On this day the reading rack held

Jehovah’s Witness tracts, old Newsweeks, a Victoria’s Secret catalog and the Greater L.A. phone book.

If ever there was a perfect captive audience for the American Poetry & Literacy Project, this was it.

In his monthlong cross-country ramble, the project’s executive director, Andrew Carroll, is giving away 100,000 copies of what prissy literati inevitably call a “slim volume of verse”--this one, an anthology of American poets.

Carroll was expected in the jury room at 2 o’clock. I was there to write about his largess--getcha red-hot sonnets right here! But Carroll is a New York guy. He flunked his driving test three times. Our traffic left him flummoxed. He wasn’t there at 2, nor at 3. At 3:30 he called; he wasn’t coming.

Two thousand free books of poetry, all those waiting jurors, and no one to make the sales pitch. I couldn’t just stand there and watch a tragedy unfold. With a nudge from the juror services manager, Gloria Gomez, I stood in for the missing Manhattanite.

I read jurors the same poem Carroll does, “Songs for the People.” Then I saw “The Road Not Taken”--saw it, and was transported back to Mrs. Sedeen’s fifth-grade class, where we were reciting Robert Frost, and it was suddenly there in my head, all these years later: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler, long I stood, and looked down one as far as I could . . . “

The jurors, bless them, all wanted copies. I don’t believe it was only because their other choices were old Newsweeks and a Victoria’s Secret catalog.

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Who’s to blame? Who recast poetry into some highbrow, egghead boogeyman? Such effluent. The instinct for poetry was already ancient when Homer was chanting the Iliad. Schoolchildren write verses to their mothers and fathers. Gangbangers compose poems to their dead homies. The farmboys in Mrs. Sedeen’s class shouted thumpety-thump stanzas as they racketed down the stairs, “Half a league, half a league, half a league onward!”

Years later, random lines can still flash into your head in fragmented disorder, one shimmering thread drawn from the warp and weft of a poem that weaves a single moment, or an age:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow between the crosses, row on row, that mark our place . . .

Here I am, an old man in a dry month, being read to by a boy, waiting for rain . . .

In Guernica the dead children were laid out in order upon the sidewalk . . .

I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked . . .

What happens to a dream deferred?

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world . . .

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house . . .

Children will say they know something “by heart” because it resides deeper than mere recall. Rhythm and words cut their grooves deep. True to Gresham’s law, the bad can crowd out the good, and if no one puts poetry into the fissures of mind and memory, to be unfolded in later years like the wings of an origami bird, then the admen will happily oblige with their jingles. And instead of the resonant pleasures of Vachel Lindsay and Emily Dickinson and W.B. Yeats, we will in old age recall the deathless promise that Chiquita Banana was here to reveal the way to tell a good banana is on the peel.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears on Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com