"POETRY OUT LOUD"

from the 2002 Atlantic Monthly

by Peter Davidson

n two of the most beautiful lines in all his sonnets, Shakespeare wrote of how even the forces of nature must yield to mortality, and asked, "How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, / Whose action is no stronger than a flower?" Between a poem and its audience something as delicately powerful as the action of a flower takes place. Robert Pinsky, during his three, important years as America's poet laureate, tried to nurture that relationship by launching the Favorite Poem Project. He asked all sorts of Americans to choose their favorite poems and tell why they chose them; then he and a co-editor, Maggie Dietz, turned to the printing press (Americans' Favorite Poems, 1999) and the Internet (www.favoritepoem.org) to explore that interaction. A number of those whose favorite poems appear in the printed anthology were filmed for the Web reciting or reading those poems aloud. The ninety-six-year-old Stanley Kunitz, a recent poet laureate, recites a poem he first encountered seventy-five years earlier, Gerard Manley Hopkins's "God's Grandeur." A seven-year-old boy recites, in cheerful singsong, a poem from Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses. A robust construction worker, perched on the step of an earthmover, reads from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." William Jefferson Clinton, in the White House, delivers a rather stiff rendering of Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Concord Hymn": "By the rude bridge that arched the flood ..."

So poetry survives in print and in memory, but the book version of Americans' Favorite Poems cannot do full justice to why Americans are drawn to those particular poems. The video version, with its extended portraits of some of the choosers, reveals that most of these readers are devoted to a particular poem because something in it reminds them of someone loved—a deceased parent or relative—or of some other loss that can never be repaired. A retired teacher, born in England but recently transplanted to San Francisco, chose to read a Goethe poem, "The Holy Longing," because "There is really no comfort. One doesn't expect one's children to die ... first." A Vietnam veteran, in tears, reads a poem by a fellow veteran, Yusef Komunyakaa, about the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. A family of three embraces a poem by Sylvia Plath called "Polly's Tree" because it reminds them of another Polly, their own daughter, who died of an asthma attack. Not many of these Americans (some of whom are emotionally bound to poems in languages other than English) respond to a poem simply because of its tuneful beauty and grace. No, we tend to think about poetry mainly when it comes time for a wedding or a funeral.

One of the most eloquent responses to a favorite poem is that of Seph Rodney, a young California photographer, who describes his first successful experience with poetry. What woke him up was "Nick and the Candlestick," an incandescent poem by Sylvia Plath about nursing an infant alone in a room, under threat of abandonment.

"It was a date situation," Rodney says. "I wanted to go out with this girl, and I just ended up feeling very bad at the end of it. It didn't work out the way I wanted it to. I just ended up feeling kind of lonely and bereft, I suppose. I came home and I opened this book, and I read some of the poems, and up until that point I think my sense of poetry was that it was always this grandiose ... highfalutin, not very real way of using language. I looked at this stuff and I could not believe it ... It was powerful, it was rough, it was bitter, it was caustic, it was at the same time really urgent about a need for love. I was amazed that here's a woman who was from a very well-heeled New England existence, and the stuff that she wrote really spoke to me, a man, a Jamaican immigrant. You could hardly get two people in the world more distant in terms of social, economic, intellectual, and religious realities. But she spoke to me. She spoke to me, she spoke, it seems, directly to my life. And because of that I have always loved her work ... I love this poem because it is crazy, because it is headlong, it is brutal, and it does not proceed rationally ... And the last line is like this gift from the gods."

If the reader or the listener is stirred by memory, the poet has been stirred by something else. Poets sacrifice much in their lives—affluence, respect, ordinary social recognition—in order to reach an audience, in the hope that their poems, once launched, may survive their experience, even their own death. Poets, like readers, want to articulate their lives by making poems to speak for their own private experience, especially the extremes of grief and joy. It hardly matters to a contemporary poet by what means a poem reaches its audience, whether it be by declamation, print, recording, or the Internet. And when the poem arrives in someone's life, the life can be changed, however slightly.