Metrophobia (otherwise known as the fear of poetry), an American pandemic more tenacious than Swine Flu, is finally on the wane. And not a moment too soon.
For the last few generations, our nation has managed to marginalize poetry, an art that is and always has been central to the species. Since the earliest hominids sounded their pre-literate, poetic musilanguage to one another, since ancient Greek orators recited poems at the Olympic Games, since the first Griot in Mali turned the history of his tribe into poetry, igniting a tradition carried on by his descendants today, since Sappho's lyrics, Basho's haikus and Rumi's ghazals, poetry has been known to be a necessary nutrient in the human diet, as essential as breath or music.
And still today in most countries, poetry resides in its time-honored place at the heart of the culture. There, people turn to poetry the way we turn to the music that fills our homes and cars, the art that covers our walls, the architecture that lines our streets, the plays, dance and film that fill our theatres. In the Middle East, for instance, the most popular prime-time TV show is The Million's Poet, boasting an audience of over 70 million viewers and ratings higher than sports or the news. Within a format similar to American Idol, male and female poets from throughout the Gulf region, some from very poor Bedouin tribes, perform poems on all themes imaginable. The show has even inspired a TV channel completely dedicated to poetry.
In most cultures, reciting poetry is not relegated to the poets, or to the alabaster halls of academia. People who never dreamed of being poets, and some who cannot read or write, recite their favorite poems at the slightest provocation. Poems are recited at parties, at the family dinner table, on the street. My students from Wales and Ireland describe how the poems of Dylan Thomas or William Butler Yeats are exchanged into the night at almost any local pub.
My Iranian friend's father knows many poems by Rumi and Hafiz. He knows them in Farsi, but if you give him time, he'll recite a dozen or more, then figure out the translations for you. An Israeli friend tells me poets are regarded there as national heroes: readers line up in the bookstores of Tel Aviv for a newly released collection of poetry with the eagerness Americans reserve for best-selling novels. In Havana, verses from the Spanish poet Antonio Machado are emblazoned in spray paint on the sides of houses. Almost every time I find myself on a plane next to someone from outside the U.S., I am gifted with a recitation of at least one of the poems he or she holds most precious. I still have the page in my diary where the Pakistani accountant wrote, first in Urdu then underneath in stumbling English, the poem that had won the heart of his wife 45 years earlier. I hope to dig that journal out of storage one day.
As a girl in Hungary in the 1930s, my friend Judith and her schoolmates used to pass the time by reciting the work of contemporary Hungarian poets to each other. "I would go home each night and pick a new poem to learn for the other kids," she remembers. "Everybody did. It was like a game. And besides, there was this feeling of impending war everywhere. Any material possession could be taken in a moment. The only things we knew we could hold on to were what we had inside us."
Could Americans, wrapped in the privilege of our relative material abundance, have temporarily forgotten the importance of "what we have inside us?"
Finally, it seems, we are rising from the sick-bed of Metrophobia, and returning to poetry. Signs of health begin to accrue. Hundreds of thousands of teens throughout the U. S. choose to learn classical and modern poems by heart and practice together for Poetry Out Loud, a national recitation competition. Slam, jam, Def, Hip Hop and rap poets tell it like it is on TV, YouTube, radio waves, and the stages of basement coffeehouses and national theaters. A major Hollywood release of the 2009 holiday season, Invictus, is about Nelson Mandela and how he was saved by a poem. Even our own president is reported to turn to Urdu poetry for sustenance.
Perhaps you, too, have been saved by a poem. I know, I know, you say you don't relate to poetry, but is that a tattered index card in your wallet with a few lines of Mary Oliver on it? And who pinned that Rumi poem to your bulletin board among the "to-do's?" Hey, isn't that a quote from the poet June Jordan on your refrigerator: We are the ones we have been waiting for?
Perhaps our shiny mask of perfect superficial beauty and conquest is finally cracking in the slings and arrows of the economic, political and military messes we have made. Perhaps it is at last becoming inexorably clear that we cannot keep ravaging the world to fill our emptiness. Perhaps we are finally turning inward, blinking a little in the unfamiliar light, and casting about for a way home to our interior life. Poetry offers a path.
Follow Kim Rosen on Twitter: www.twitter.com/savedbyapoem
Travis Nichols: How Do You Like Your Poetry?
Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More
The Poetry Foundation : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.
Poetry - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Poetry of Obama's First 100 Days
Thank you for your post. I hope your success will boost a wider appreciation for poetry as an art form, so delicate and literary "fragile" in a comercial book publishing sense, yet so touching and beautiful for the soul.
My friends and I who are poets find that in our region we're dismayed that poetry really is of interest mostly only to the over 40 crowd. Readings don't attract younger folk but rarely. Of course the slams do and that is the ONLY exception, but then when that happens there's a total lack, and I mean total, of understanding of anything about poetry other than rudimentary rap. We try to turn young folks there at the slams, while encouraging their creativity, on to other wider ranges of poetic sounds and options and some are interested but it's an uphill battle. There's just not a real interest in poetry in American culture. Then again it's usually been that way with American culture as opposed to European that it's whatever is commercially successful that is of interest to most people and what they are tuned to hear. Subtler sounds, ideas, images, views are for cult followings in America most of the time. So poetry is tuned out. There are exceptions that make their way into the fabric-- Coleman Barks with Rumi, Billy Collins, people who find a way that generates some interest. Not anywhere on the scale of other countries nor our own past with Allen Ginsberg or Jack Kerouac who captured many's attention with narratives they related to at the moment.
I don't agree with other commenters that poetry has lost its relevance. I think, rather, that Americans have become so convinced that poetry isn't relevant to them, that they don't find those poems that *are* or could/would be relevant to them, and meaningful, and life-changing. I always tell my students that 90-95% of the poems I pick up do nothing for me - but the other 5-10% make it all worthwhile. I don't fall in love with most of the people I meet either, but that doesn't mean I dismiss people as irrelevant to my life!
In a Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman makes the case that poetry is actually a hybrid of speech and music, and as such, works on and in our brains in unique ways. As you point out, even people who would profess to "hate poetry" may write it in private - at least when inspired by love or heartbreak. That's what keeps it alive, even if marginalized. No, of course poetry is not The One True Path, but I do believe it could help move and heal many people who currently don't have it on their radar at all.
Yes I am a poet and most of my intellectual life is centered around both poetry and music. I think it is unfortunate that for so many people poetry is immediately identified as academic or something equally unappetizing when they sit down to consume some art, but I am not going to tell them that poetry is better than whatever they’re used to. I’m not saying that’s what Kim is doing, but I feel that many poetry enthusiasts have acquired a sense of superiority with their passion and that bothers me.
Statement one is that it’s pretty evident that for most people in America poetry has no relevance; and why should it? There is such an overabundance of nearly every form of art—including poetry—that people can choose what they want and just be happy with whatever art form excites them the most. Nothing wrong with that. Of course poetry has something that other art forms don’t offer, but other art forms all have something that poetry can’t offer as well. Just stop insisting that every person in the world will be redeemed by poetry if they commit themselves to it—it’s like being a door-to-door Jehova’s Witness, except instead of there being only one way to have your soul saved, there are at least a couple dozen.
Continued below
"What is this poet trying to say?"
How about SAYING it and finding out?
By the way, with help from a colleague who taught acting, I reformed--and with help from Kim's book, I'm now USING poetry much more fully myself!
"That old black magic has me in its spell, that old black magic that you weave so well...."
1. I agree that Americans need to spend more time looking inward, but that's not why poetry is no longer popular. Any time any art form or medium loses its place near the top of the cultural pavillion, it's because it's ceased to be relevant. That doesn't mean somebody can't pick up a book of poetry today and apply it to their lives, but the art form, at least in this country, has lost its ability to speak to the masses. If it were still able to speak to the masses, it WOULD speak to the masses, and it would still be popular. Poetry, like all forms of art, needs to adapt to a changing society--and by adapt, I don't mean making it more structureless and weird, nor do I mean making it loud and nerdy like SLAM. I'm a writer but not a poet, so I don't claim to have the fix to "bring poetry back"--but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth when artists blame their audience when their art isn't doing the trick. The burden is, and always will be and should be, on the artist.
2. Don't call rap and hip-hop doggerel, and don't give me that "technically speaking" garbage. Most rap and most hip-hop, like most mainstream music, is entirely trash, but the best of hip-hop represents the best, most honest, raw, and truth-telling poetry we've seen from this country in thirty or forty years.
I named my company Waxpoetix in spite of my marketing and pr peers urgings not to. The reason I chose the name is not only practical (I wanted to OWN a word for google search purposes) but also inspirational (for me, at least). The poetry of Emerson and Thoreau changed my life as a young Wall Street banker who had recently lost his father. I was searching for meaning and found it through their words. I started writing poetry for myself and for friends with a little humor thrown in and it turned me toward a new career path. Poetry is redemptive and powerful. I will carry this torch with you.
You experience poetry every day. By the time you're an adult in this culture, you're well trained in a system of survival of the fittest. You're versed in grasping, not giving.
That's been the American (and humanity's) way, but Kim's right. We're changing. We're evolving. The media and politicians and their masters the bankers and insurance executives will never be at the front of this evolution, but you are. Kim and millions like her are birthing a new paradigm, and poetry is at its heart's core, just as it is at your heart's core.
Open to the magic of poetry and you open to greater wisdom, focus, and contentment than you are probably settling for. "Don't be afraid," the poet Jane Kenyon told us, "God does not leave us comfortless." Let poetry come. Let your poetry out. It will heal you, and you will restore the planet.
--Robert McDowell, author of Poetry as Spiritual Practice: Reading, Writing, and Using Poetry in Your Daily Rituals, Aspirations, and Intentions
Yes I also agree with what you have written except what you wrote "poetry is scary". Only for those beginning and then it is not the poetry which may frighten but the ridicule some may fear from their fellow humans who are much tougher on the football pitch and cannot read their way out of a wet paper bag.
That faze passes for those who find their own voice.
Norge