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October 11, 2007 10:00 PM

Bringing Poetry Down from the Tower

In 2004, Mercersburg was fortunate enough to have a visit from former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. At the time, Pinsky had recently finished his stint as Laureate and was still promoting a huge project he started under the auspices of the office. He was traveling the country encouraging ordinary folk to read their favorite poems aloud in public readings; he called it the Favorite Poem Project. In this way, Pinsky began to make poetry a more viable art for the ordinary soul--accessible and alive to everyone. It was his attempt to bring the art down from the ivory tower, if you will. He was not the last Poet Laureate to attempt such a thing.

More recently, the very engaging Billy Collins started a web site for high school students called poetry 180, so they could have access to a poem for each day of school in a 180 day school year. All of the poems on the site are highly accessible; none are too rarefied or obscure to intimidate the reader. His effort, of course, like Pinsky's is really to make poetry a living, relevant art to the day-to-day person. In this case, the high school student.

Since the publication of the web site, there has also been the publication of a book called Poetry 180 to serve the same function. Some of the poems are new poems, but most are the same poems as on the web site. What's instrumental about this site and the book is that it gives a student access to contemporary poetry that he or she probably otherwise would not have, and this is important.

American poetry is alive and well. Each year the editors of Best American Poetry have little trouble finding work to fill the volume. However, I fear that the coterie reading this rich source of contemporary poetry might be smaller than, say, what is deserved of such a affluent, vibrant art. There are literally hundreds of poetry journals out there publishing contemporary poetry by new, emerging and established poets; most of them have fairly small readerships, however.

What a website like Collins' does is make such contemporary poetry easily accessible, so students don't have to hunt the stuff down. He also gives good instruction on how to read a poem--an non-intimidating lesson. His own poem on reading poetry follows:

Introduction to Poetry

Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

This poems sides with the student who has always resented the analytical approach to poetry: the one who says, "Aren't you reading too much into it?" Well, not to engage the debate, but rather to give that particular devil's advocate his due, Collins says, "yes," here in this poem--He suggests we do ask too much of the poem analytically and not enough of it aesthetically. Most of the poems on the website are this accessible, this straightforward, betraying the myth that poetry must be difficult to be good.

Let us hope that Poet Laureates continue to work in this vein like Pinsky and Collins, trying to put poetry out there for people to access easily and honestly.

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Posted by Matthew Kearney at October 11, 2007 10:00 PM


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Introduction to Poetry

Billy Collins

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