After
a bout with the fake flu that everyone is giving to each other like a hot
potato that you don’t want to catch, the Steiny Road Poet is back from what she
will now call her Life of Poetry
tour. This is the tour that started January 15, 2013, in San Francisco with Poetry in Red Dress that offered poems
of Muriel Rukeyser and Gertrude Stein and featured Karren Alenier, Mary Mackey,
Evelyn Posamentier, and Margo Taft Stever and concluded January 20, 2013, in
Venice, California, with Beyond Baroque:East & West Coast Poets that showcased Karren Alenier, Andrea Carter
Brown, David Del Bourgo, and Margo Taft Stever. More about this tour shortly
but first the Steiny Poet wants to talk about how poetry in America is treated.
HAVE
POETS GONE POSTAL?
Apparently
The Washington Post opinion writer Alexandra Petri has been stirring the embers
where sick potatoes are roasted to raise the same old question about whether
poetry is dead. In the Saturday January 26, 2013, print edition of The Washington Post, the
editors finally saw fit to print Richard Blanco’s poem of elegant heft “One Today,” which he presented at the public swearing in of
Barack Obama for a second term as president of the United States. In the same
print edition, the Post editors also published Petri’s essay “Ode to an obsolete
art” where she sarcastically wrote, “Poets are like the Postal Service—a group of people
sedulously doing something that we no longer need, under the misapprehension
that they are offering us a vital service.” Petri also stated, “We have movies
now capable of presenting images to us with a precision that would have made
Ezra Pound keel over. All the things that poetry used to do, other things do
much better.” What Mad Men sold Ms. Petri this bill of goods?
While
Ms. Petri, a 2010 undergraduate of Harvard knows her ancient poetry assuring us
that all literature in its day—The Iliad,
The Odyssey, Gilgamesh—used to be poetry, she apparently has not read Muriel
Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry.
Rukeyser, who had a thick FBI dossier and who worked in Hollywood as a film
cutter, said in her book published in 1949 that Americans see poetry fit to be “passed
on but not … used” except for ads and greeting cards. According to Rukeyser, good
poetry is “time-resistant more than monuments.” She said Americans fear poetry
not only because they are afraid of not being able to understand it, but also
it might expose their feelings and cause them to respond. She says poetry
prepares the reader for action in perhaps unexpected ways, ways associated with
emotional exposure.
Rukeyser
said the images produced by Hollywood are all about advertising. Rukeyser was
enlisted to work with the WWII effort to fight against Fascism, but ad
people elbowed out the creative thinkers saying the people at home during
wartime were customers (as opposed to
citizens) who needed to just win
without considering the meaning of what the country was fighting against and
for. She also wrote in her manifesto, “The writer becoming an employee in Hollywood, forced to
conform to a code which dictates emotional limits, and producing material which
can be censored and re-arranged, with or without his knowledge, is a key figure
in our society.” Why? Because movies are part of our every day fare? Why shouldn't poetry fill this gap?
LESSONS
FROM THE LIFE OF POETRY TOUR
So
now that Steiny Poet has completed her Life
of Poetry tour in California, the question most people would ask is what
difference did it make? Actually, the better question is what was learned?
Lesson Number
1—the literary community in San Francisco does not support its writers. Two
outsiders, Karren Alenier of the Washington DC area and Margo Stever of the
Greater New York City area landed at the San Francisco airport on January 12,
scrambled over to an Alameda meeting of 20 plus women poets of the Greater San Francisco
Bay area, read poems with this group for two hours (everyone sharing their own work) and got exactly one person in attendance at the Poetry in Red Dress
reading and that one person had been someone that Alenier had attended three of
her readings held in the DC area over a period of several years. Two of the Red
Dress poets—Evelyn Posamentier and Mary Mackey—were San Francisco area poets
well known to this salon. Salon member said during that warm and gracious salon reception that there were too many readings going on in the Bay Area and they
were not sure what to do about it. However,
everyone agreed that it was important to keep on doing readings. Also despite
several emails to Joyce Jenkins of Poetry
Flash and help from a Poetry Flash
insider, no notice of Red Dress was listed in their community calendar.
Lesson Number
2—don’t count on local writers in San Francisco to draw audience. While the
Steiny Poet and her traveling mate Margo Stever were trying to arrange a
reading in The City by the Bay, one desperate bookseller, who later apologized
but nonetheless did not schedule a reading for Red Dress, demanded that book
sales and audience count be guaranteed. The fact was Red Dress at Books and Bookshelves had a respectable audience numbering around 30 people and over $275
worth of books was sold.
Lesson Number 3—the
most interesting reactions come from audience who were not literary writers. Poetry in Red
Dress which had a script that included group readings of work by Rukeyser and
Alenier as well as solo readings by each participating poet and presentation of
poems by Gertrude Stein, got such comments as:
“I
go to a lot of poetry readings with my wife (this was science professor by
training) and this program was so interesting and well done. It may be the best
I have ever experienced.”
“I
enjoyed the variety of subject matter in the poetry and the pacing. I am now
excited to go back to reading poetry which I haven’t done in a long time.” (Artistic
director of an Asian-style theater company)
Lesson Number
4—don’t underestimate efforts at blogging and social media like Facebook and
twitter.
What really made the Steiny Poet’s day for Red Dress was having a couple show
up who said they came because they read about it in the Poet’s blog posts.
Lesson Number
5—Californians have a much more laid back approach to how they handle things
that can frustrate the get-it-right-the-first-time East Coaster. Beyond Baroque, a struggling arts organization with budget issues (just like every other nonprofit in America), took weeks to get
an announcement up on their website calendar and then the information was
incorrect and, worse, accented information that had no relevance to the
workshop and reading that Alenier and Stever orchestrated. Slowly things were
corrected. The Steiny knew from talking to a San Francisco poet who had also
scheduled a Beyond Baroque workshop and reading that if there was to be any
audience at all, it was strictly up to participating poets.
Lesson Number
6—reach out to people whom you want to see in your audience with personal
one-on-one conversations well before the event. The Steiny
Poet and her travel mate did this for both the Red Dress and Beyond Baroque
readings. It worked in both cases and especially interesting was that a member of
Alenier’s Coursera Modern Poetry class showed for the Beyond Baroque workshop
and the brand newly appointed poet laureate of Los Angeles Eloise Klein Healy
attended the BB reading much to the pleasure of everyone associated with the
arts center and those in the audience. Also Alenier was able to connect with
her former teacher James Ragan (well known at Beyond Baroque and a poet who has
read his work to thousands on international stages) who brought his daughter,
the poet Tera Vale Ragan.
In
the end, the communication of poetry in America still goes between a small
number of people. Giving poetry readings is a kind of frontier, where only the
brave or foolish travel. Those of us, who carry a torch for poetry,
do it because we know it adds meaning to our lives and we hope to the lives of
others. For Alenier and Stever, this was not a vanity tour. Both extended
themselves to other writers living and not. Both hoped to pass on knowledge
about why living the life of poetry matters.
ONE
TODAY
And
while Alenier missed the live reading of Richard Blanco’s “One Today” because
she was flying back from her Life of
Poetry tour , she would be happy to illuminate why Blanco’s poem,
written for a special occasion in our American history, will be “time-resistant
more than monuments.” For starters, think about how it evokes Martin Luther
King’s I-had-a-dream speech, the Newtown murders of 20 little children, and
9/11 without prosaic commentary.
All of us as vital as the one light
we move through,
the same light on blackboards with
lessons for the day:
equations to solve, history to
question, or atoms imagined,
the "I have a dream" we
all keep dreaming,
or the impossible vocabulary of
sorrow that won't explain
the empty desks of twenty children
marked absent
today, and forever.
One sky: since the Appalachians and
Sierras claimed
their majesty, and the Mississippi
and Colorado worked
their way to the sea. Thank the
work of our hands:
weaving steel into bridges,
finishing one more report
for the boss on time, stitching
another wound
or uniform, the first brush stroke
on a portrait,
or the last floor on the Freedom
Tower
jutting into a sky that yields to
our resilience.
(excerpts from Richard Blanco’s
“One Today”)
Copyright © 2013 Richard Blanco
WHAT’S NEXT
No,
Alexandra Petri, poetry is not dead and there is no hot potato to catch. It’s
time for you to go out with your friends and support what poets do. And by the way,
Natasha Trethewey, our new American poet laureate, is reading at the Library of Congress January 30 on the subject of the civil war and how it still affects us today.
Ask Ms. Trethewey if poetry matters. Ask her if poetry is dead.