Is National Poetry Month A Good Idea?

If one were to search for the inspiration for the recent and peculiarly American phenomenon known as National Poetry Month, you might find it all the way back in The Prologue to Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales :

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licour,

Of which vertu engendred is the flour...

These lines of Middle English celebrating the arrival of spring echo through six centuries of English verse to find their rejoinder in the opening lines of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land":

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Every April since 1996, the Academy of American Poets has joined with a coalition of publishers, booksellers, librarians and literary organizations to sponsor National Poetry Month to increase awareness and appreciation of poetry among the general public.

In small towns and big cities, historic villages and well-heeled suburbs--and pretty much from sea to shining sea across America--poetry is read, spoken, distributed and discussed in in public libraries, high school auditoriums, assembly halls and community centers for thirty lyrical days, at which point the lights come up, the music stops, and everyone discovers, as in the classic play by Moliere, that they've spent their entire lives speaking in prose.

In market terms, National Poetry Month is a seasonal campaign that tends to concentrate the sales figures for published poetry in the U.S. market into a six week period.  A great many anthologies and book releases--the publishing industry now refers to them alarmingly as "launches"--by America's "major" poets are now advanced or delayed for April roll out.  This may be a successful commercial strategy for the publishing industry, but what is its effect on the nature and practice of poetry itself?

In his witty and provocative contrarian essay "Against National Poetry Month As Such,"  ( http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/044106.html ) the poet/critic Charles Bernstein (who during his 13 year stint in Buffalo was co-founder of UB's Poetics Program) argues:

"National Poetry Month is about making poetry safe for readers by promoting examples of the art form at its most bland and its most morally "positive." The message is: Poetry is good for you. But, unfortunately, promoting poetry as if it were an "easy listening" station just reinforces the idea that poetry is culturally irrelevant and has done a disservice not only to poetry deemed too controversial or difficult to promote but also to the poetry it puts forward in this way.

"Accessibility," argues Bernstein, "has become a kind of Moral Imperative based on the condescending notion that readers are intellectually challenged, and mustn't be presented with anything but Safe Poetry...But [accessibility] to what? Not to anything that would give a reader or listener any strong sense that poetry matters, but rather access to a watered down version that lacks the cultural edge and the aesthetic sharpness of the best popular and mass culture. The only reason that poetry matters is that is has something different to offer, something slower on the uptake, maybe, but more intense for all that, and also something necessarily smaller in scale in terms of audience. Not better than mass culture but a crucial alternative to it."

I find myself in the curious position of agreeing with virtually all of what Bernstein says, but still having a genuine appreciation for all the self-generating and self-sustaining community-based poetry events that have taken root in the Buffalo area in celebration of National Poetry Month without official Academy of American Poets funding or sanctioning.

Bernstein's objection, after all, is to a kind of "risk free" poetry imposed upon the masses by an "Official Verse Culture," but events like Celia White and Joseph Todaro's "Urban Epiphany" (April 29)--a marathon reading featuring 100 or more Buffalo area poets each reading two minute segments or the Buffalo/Williamsville Poetry, Music, and Dance Celebration (April 26)--which each year brings a "major" American poet (this year it's Sonia Sanchez) into contact with high school students for year long performance projects of their own design are events uniquely rooted in Buffalo's egalitarian ethos of do-it-yourself experimentalism.  They are authentic expressions of the community's creative spirit.

What do you think about National Poetry Month?  Has it had any impact on the way you relate to poetry in your life?

Comments

[Paul Hogan]

A few thoughts: Mr. Bernstein seems to have too much time on his hands, and spending his considerable intellectual prowess to slam poetry month (albeit wittily) seems to be a gratuitous waste of it. That’s first.

Second, I feel almost stupid pointing out to him that poetry month, by its nature, is intended to be introductory and sweeping, designed to lead people in who are curious or ignorant (as in ‘uninformed’) or both, and not to hit them with the most sophisticated, challenging, fearsome stuff that has been penned. It’s poetry month, for god’s sake. Undergrad English 201. Survey. A bit above Hallmark, but not nearly Bernstein.

Third, Relevant to What? Isn’t relevance to a different way of expressing and hearing and feeling enough? As with anything, understanding comprises both the intellectual and the emotional. The relevance of poetry to beginners or novices -- at best – is to give them ACCESS to themselves and their worlds in somewhat different terms. Terms other than television’s, but not quite Bernstein’s. Understanding those terms, and incorporating them into one’s view of and ability to describe the world, takes time, and more importantly, happens in phases. Start Here. If you’re still interested, Get to Here.

There are all manner of festivals and conferences and seminars available year round at which people who have become very smart (and myopic) in poetry and its trappings and comforts can expound on its state and relevance in the universe. I guess I’d suggest that poetry month probably isn’t the place to have those happen (see paragraph two) for those who have attained such levels of understanding. Wrong end of the telescope, eh?

What articles like Bernstein’s do primarily is shut down the impulse to participate, both for the reader/listener/witness AND for the prospective writer. They say to someone who has just stepped up to sit back down until you’re smarter or edgier. Making poetry “safe” for a few weeks (which, I feel stupid pointing out, is not at all true for all poetry presented during this period) is something that should be understood to be a first step on the journey that leads, ultimately, to – where? – Ah, yes: to Bernstein.

[Lisa Forrest]

Great job on the blog Bob! I agree with what Bernstein says about the condescending nature of "safe poetry." I've found that many of the students I work with are actually eager and open to discover poetry that "matters"...poetry that challenges. "The Rooftop Poetry Club" recently completed a multimedia poetry project using outdated art slides...the project is posted on You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/rooftoppoetryclub
(don't miss Matt Thompson's "Art & Taxes")...

[Celia White]

I also like to think April is NPM because of Shakespeare's birthday (April 23) which I happen to share.

As I teach in the schools, I find an amazingly high percentage of students who neither read nor write poetry--such a change from even ten years ago. But it is true that schools can't make kids connect with poetry on their own, and exposure to a wide variety of poetry, such as is achieved during April, almost always allows people of any age to discover a poem they can relate to. Delight!

[Dave Lampe]

Ambivalenve about the poetry/pop world is the
feelings we all share. But
what you leave(or is it leaf)
out is the idea of celebration (damn little of that these days) and folly
(the April Fools element). Why not praise the folly of
hearing/reading/writing poetry--a form
that gives pleasure in many
forms and actually doesn't
often hurt people (except those who deserve to be
satirized -- and there are
many of them in the "poebuis" world). And we should also
celebrate Buffalo where we do
have the chance to see/hear/
read such a variety of voices
year round.