By MARSHA MERCER
Have you read a
poem in the past year? If so, you’re in the minority.
Just seven in
100 Americans read poetry even once in the past 12 months, government figures
show, down from 17 percent in 1992.
“Poetry is going
extinct,” a headline in The Washington Post lamented in 2015, after the 2012 statistics,
the latest available, were released.
But wait. Sometimes
called the Cinderella of literary forms, poetry isn’t dead; it’s not even
asleep.
I won’t go as
far as a British newspaper, which earlier this year heralded a “genuine
renaissance” in poetry in the United Kingdom. But, in the United States,
poetry, like an endangered species that’s been protected, is showing signs of
life.
Poetry Out Loud
programs in all 50 states invite students in grades 9 through 12 to compete in contests
by memorizing and reciting poetry. The Library of Congress this year named the
first national youth poet laureate.
A new book, “Why
Poetry,” urges people to stop thinking of a poem as a riddle or code to crack and
read what the words say to them.
“Like classical
music, poetry has the unfortunate reputation for requiring special training and
education to appreciate, which makes us feel (unnecessarily) as if we haven’t
studied enough to read it,” Matthew Zapruder, a poet and former poetry editor
of the New York Times Magazine, writes in “Why Poetry.”
Tracy K. Smith is the new poet laureate
of the United States, the 22nd in a line of literary legends that
includes Robert Frost, Richard Wilbur and Rita Dove. Dove also served as poet
laureate of Virginia and holds the Commonwealth chair at the University of
Virginia.
The
author of three books of poetry, Smith, 45, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
in 2012. Her 2015 memoir, “Ordinary Light,” was a finalist for the National
Book Award. She and her husband, Raphael Allison, a literary scholar, teach at
Princeton University and have three children.
Smith said a few
months ago that as poet laureate she would take poetry beyond the ivy walls of universities
and urban literary festivals to places where it is seldom heard or read. She
received invitations from communities struggling with addiction as well as from
nursing homes, hospitals and hospices.
“Nursing homes
are often overlooked” when we think of poetry, she said in a telephone
interview Wednesday, before her inaugural reading at the Library of Congress. “Poetry
can be very useful at the end of life.”
The U.S. poet
laureate, who is chosen by the Librarian of Congress, has few duties beyond
fostering a national appreciation of the reading and writing poetry. And, if you’re
wondering, no, this is not a case of your tax dollars at work.
The poet laureate’s stipend is privately
funded through an endowment created in 1936 by Archer M. Huntington, a philanthropist
whose mother was from Richmond. Among Huntington’s many gifts was the money to
start the Mariner’s Museum in Newport News.
The
title originally was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. In 1985, Congress
changed it to Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.
When
he had the job in 1963, Howard Nemerov was only half joking, the library says
in a history, when he wrote, “The Consultant in Poetry is a very busy man,
chiefly because he spends so much time talking with people who want to know
what the Consultant in Poetry does.”
For Smith, who still
remembers the thrill of discovering Emily Dickinson in fifth grade, her job
will be to make poetry less stressful and more enjoyable.
“People have
anxiety about poetry,” she said. They see a poem as an object “that must be
analyzed to death to be enjoyed or understood.”
But there’s no
need to feel obliged to wrestle hidden meaning from poems. Plus, who couldn’t
benefit from taking a few minutes from our busy, tech- and information-overloaded
days to let poetry speak to us?
“Poems teach us
how to read them,” Smith says. So, when her students read a poem for the first
time, she starts with a simple question: “What do you notice?”
It’s a good question,
one I plan to ask myself more often – and not only when I’m reading a poem.
©
2017 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.
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