I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle . . .
— Marianne Moore
If you were forced to sit through hours of classroom time slogging through the seemingly incomprehensible — word upon word, stanza upon stanza of ghastly rhyme and meter, archaic language and even more arcane concepts — well . . . welcome to the club. The Poetry Hater’s Club. Teacher stood up front and read dramatically from a dusty old book and then asked you the most soul-numbing question you could imagine: What does this MEAN?
There are only two real answers to this question. One: How the heck should I know? And, two, Who the heck cares? Honestly, they should issue licenses to teach poetry just so this kind of thing doesn’t happen . . .
I wrote my first poem at the age of eight, a little four-line masterpiece about how much I hated April Fool’s Day. It was published in the Massapequa Public School District anthology, a smart collection of ditties from students aged 7 through 17 that was mimeographed, stapled in the upper left-hand corner of its canary yellow cover sheet and sent home with us students. From that moment, in that simple act of publication, I was hooked. I was going to be a poet. This, in spite of the years of classroom humiliation and utter bleak textual confusion that lay ahead . . . I was determined to be a poet.
Years passed. I continued to write. And today I consider myself to be something of a professional poet. But since I do not teach poetry in an academic situation, I get pretty much nothing for it. No compensation other than the sweet satisfaction of stringing together some words in a pleasant enough way so that my husband and friends don’t cringe too much when they read what I’ve written. No compensation other than the satisfaction of sharing my love of creative word management with strangers in my workshops who come to learn that they, too, have something important to say. It’s okay. I’ve even convinced a few small magazines and a book publisher that I was worthy of publication. That’s all the encouragement I need. It doesn’t take much.
But since 1996, I’ve taken comfort in poetry in yet another way. That’s when The Academy of American Poets established National Poetry Month — 30 days during which time poetry is once again brought to the attention of the media and the public at large. Why? To increase the visibility and availability of poetry in our popular culture, which is today in desperate need of something more profound and life-affirming than the next “rose ceremony.”
So for nearly two decades now, GOOD teachers, librarians, poets and booksellers have been turning their attention to poetry during the month of April. In classrooms and libraries. In bookstores. On community stages. And with the help of some government agencies, even in buses and subways. The ultimate purpose? To encourage poetry readership year-round, of course. Here are the goals of National Poetry Month:
- Highlight the extraordinary legacy and ongoing achievement of American poets
- Introduce more Americans to the pleasures of reading poetry
- Bring poets and poetry to the public in immediate and innovative ways
- Make poetry a more important part of the school curriculum
- Increase the attention paid to poetry by national and local media
- Encourage increased publication, distribution, and sales of poetry books
- Increase public and private philanthropic support for poets and poetry
You can tell I’m a true believer, can’t you? With apologies to Paul, when I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary Oliver comes to me . . . or Edna St. Vincent Millay. . . or Linda Pastan . . . or Marvin Bell and William Matthews, if I’m in need of a dash of wry.
I invite you to check out the Academy’s website and see how you, too, can participate in National Poetry Month, which is now the largest literary celebration in the world. For starters, you can participate in “Poem in Your Pocket” day on April 29. If you’re a teacher, you can get free poetry lesson plans and tip sheets. If you’re a bookseller or librarian, you can get free tipsheets, too. An easy way to participate is to look around your community for local poetry readings and slams — even better, write a poem yourself and show up for an open mike night somewhere!
The most important thing is to shake off the old memories of bad English teachers and what they made you do: memorize pointlessly, look for the “one true meaning” in a poem, stifle your own creativity as you tried to put pen to paper. It doesn’t have to be that way, folks. It’s a new day. Finish the Marianne Moore poem that I began this post with. Travel with her into those “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” It’ll be okay. I promise.
Buon viaggio!
Poetry
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician–
nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and
school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make
a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination”–above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,”
shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.
Linda Dini Jenkins is a card-carrying Italophile, travel planner, freelance writer, and amateur photographer. Travel is her passion, so writing about her travels just comes naturally. She hopes all her travelers find a way to express their joys, surprises, and fears as they travel and gives every traveler a nifty journal to help smooth the way. Learn more…
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