poetry: who needs it ? by william logan - new york times

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poetry: who needs it ? by william logan 


                               poetry: who needs it ? 
                                    by  william logan,  June 14, 2014

GAINESVILLE - WE live in the age of grace and the age of grace and the age of futility- the age of speed and the age of dullness.  The way we live now is not poetic.  We live prose, we breathe prose, and we drink, alas, prose.  There is prose that does us not great harm, nd that may even, in small doses, prose medecinal, the way snake oil cured everything by curing nothing.  But to live continaully in the natter of ill-written and ill-spoken prose is to become deaf to what language can do.  

The dirty secret of poetry is that it is loved by some, loathed by many and bought by almost usone. (Is this the silent majority?  Well, once the " silent majority" meant the dead.)  We now have a poetry month, and a poet laureate - the latest Charles Wright, announced just last week -- and poetry plastered in buses and subway cars like adverstising placards.  If the subway line wont run it, the poet can always tweet it, so long as it's only 20 words or so, we have all these ways of throwing poetry at the crowd is not composed of people who particularly want to read poetry- or who, having read a little  poetry are likely to breathe latest edition of "Paradise Lost".

This is not a disaster.  Most people are also unlikely to  attend the ballet, or an evening with a character-musical quartet, or the latest exhibition of Georges de la Tour.  Poetry  has long been a major art with  a minor audience.  Poets have always found it hard to make a living -- at poetry, that is.  The exceptions who discovered that a few sonnets could be turned into a bankroll might have made just as much money  betting on the South Sea Bubble.

There are still those odd sorts, no doubt disturbed, and unsocial, and tortures  of eats, who love poetry neverthless.  They come in ones or two to the difficult monologues of Browning, or the shadowy quatrains of Emily Dickinson, or the awful but cheerful poems of Elizabeth Bishop, finding something there not in the novel or the pop song.

Many arts have flourished in one period, then found a smaller niche in which they' ve survived perfectly well.  A century ago, poetry did not appear on little magazines  devoted  to it, but on the pages of newaspaers and mass-circulation magazines. The big magazines and even the newspapers began deelining about the time they stopped printing poetry.  ( I know, I know -- I've put the cause before the hroses.)  On the other hand, perhaps Congress started to decline.  When the office of poet laureate was created.  The Senate and the House were able to bumble along perfectly well during the near half century when there was only a Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress --- an office that, had the Pentagon only been connected, might have been acronysmized as C.I.P.L.O.C. instead of being renamed.

Poetry has was a long ago showed aside in schools.  In colleges it's often easier to find courses on race or class of gender than on the Augustans or Romantic.  In high schools and grade schools, when poetry is taught at all, too often it is as a schudder of self expression on,  without any attempt to look at the difficulties and majistives of verse and the subtleties of meaning that make poetry poetry.  No wonder kids don't  like it -- it becomes another way to bully them into feeding " compassion" or " tolerances " part of curriculum that makes them good citizens but bad readers of poetry.

My blue-sky proposal : teach America's kids to read by making them read poetry, Shakes-peare and Pope and Milton by the fith grade; in high school, Dante and Catullus in the original.  By graduation, they would know Anne Carson and Derek Walcott by hearts.  A child taught to parse a sentence by Dickinson would have no trouble understanding Donald H. Rumsfeld's  known knowns  and unknown unkonowns.

We don't like in such a world, and perhaps not even poets alive today wish we did. My ideal elementary-school curriculm would instead require all children to learn: (1) the time tables up to, say, 25; (2) a foreign language, preferably obscures; (3) the geography of a foreign land, like New Jersey; (4) how to use basic had tools and cook a cassoulet; (5) how to raise a bird or lizard ) if the child is vegeterian, then a potato; (6) poems by heart, say one per week; (7) how to find the way home from a town at least 10 miles away; )8)  singing; (9) somersaults.  With all that out of the way by age 12, there's  no telling what children might do.  I have thieved a couple of items from Mr. H. Auden's dream curriculum for a college of Bards.  If my elementary school students are not completely digusted by poetry, off they could go one day to that college well prepared.

THE idea that poetry much be popular is simply a mistake. Yet who would have suspected that the Metropolitain Opera and the National Theater in London would now be broadcast to local movies theaters across America.  The cigar-chewing promoter who can find a way to put poetry before readers and make them love it will do more for the art than a century of  hand-wringing.  He might also turn a back.  You can live a full-life without knowinmg a scrap of poetry just as you can live a full life without even seen a Picasso or " The Cherry Orchard."  Most people surround themselves with art of some sort, whether it's by Amy Winehouse or Richard Avedon.  Even the daubs on the refrigerator by the toddler artist have their place.  Language gainfully employed has its places.  Poetry will never has the audience of " Game of Thrones" -- that is what television can do .  Poetry is what language alone can do. []

     william logan 
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WILLIAM LOGAN
(born 1950 is an American poet,critic,and scholar)

Logan was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to W. Donald Logan,Jr.
and Nancy Logan.  He lives in Gainesville, Florida and Cambridge,England with his wife, the poet and artist, Debora Greger. Educated at Yale (BA, 1972, and the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa (MFA 1975),he has authored eight books of poetry as well as of live books of criticsm.     WIKIPEDIA