Why Poetry?

This is the follow-up to yesterday's post.  All the poems which were read at the event are listed at the end of this post.

Have you been wondering why the poet is not the bread or the knife?  I've been wrestling with the concept since Sunday afternoon, when I celebrated the 50th Anniversary of The University of Arizona Poetry Center.  Billy Collins was there, and so was Samuel Chlepka.  Classmates from my epic poetry seminar were in the audience, as was the director of the program and the President of the university.  I sat 4 rows from a former US Poet Laureate, and it's only because they begged us not to take pictures that I can't share the physical feeling.

It was a very well-behaved audience; the movie lauding the Poetry Center ended and we all sat quietly, not wanting to disturb the silence.  The 5 presenters entered stage right, passing the podium and finding their places on 5 folding chairs.  These poetry readings don't seem to go in for much in the way of set decoration.  There wasn't even a potted plant on the stage.  Then, again, Robert Frost spoke from the same stage 50 years ago at the dedication ceremony for the Poetry Center, so who am I to complain?

I wonder if Republicans like poetry?  There were references to mourning an election outcome and the plight of illegal entrants which received warm applause.  But that was a very small portion of the afternoon; politics were less important than culture for a brief and wonderful moment.  It wasn't as hard as I had feared it would be, a fact that Billy Collins mentioned in his introductory remarks.  saying that "People say they don't read poetry because it is difficult, but it is difficult because people don't read it."  I suppose it's like anything else, the more you do it the more facile you become.  The Big Cuter explained his making quick work of assignments which took his high school classmates an inordinate amount of time by telling them that reading, like lacrosse, got easier the more you practiced.  I'd always assumed he'd read for the sheer pleasure of the experience; how could I know that he was also practicing for law school?


The poet went on to say that being difficult is a good thing, that the reward is commensurate with the effort invested, and that not everything has to be a James Patterson quickie.  I reveled in the murmurs of agreement from the audience.  These were people who would not settle for mediocrity, people who were willing to work for their preferred outcomes.

David Fitzsimmons, editorial cartoonist and political pundit featured in our local paper, read his three poems first.  He had us laughing about bears chasing campers and the futility of trying to protect oneself, for, after all, people get hurt by safety pins.  Howard Altman, a poet from New York by way of Canada, took us down a darker, sadder pathway, as we cleaned up after the war and imagined the death of a daughter's father as they shared a quiet moment fly-fishing in the river.  Without the laughter, the audience shared the pauses and the sighs.  We were connected in the silence.

Have you read Interred with Their Bones?  It's a Shakespearean mystery and the author, Jennifer Lee Carrell, brought her classicist's sensibility to the stage next.  Gerald Manley Hopkins and Alfred, Lord Tennyson were denser than the others' selections, but the language was so grand that I let it sweep over me and stopped worrying about following the content precisely.  I was traveling with Ulysses and being blown by Hopkins' wind and the fact that I was lost in the moment must have been part of the original intent, don't you think?  Ms. Carrell's mother says that her daughter has five degrees in fairy tales, and that's how I heard her telling the stories as she read her choices.  Of course, Billy Collins says that all poets write about death and that majoring in English is majoring in Death so maybe there is more than one truth to following a literary path through academia.

Ernesto Portillo, Jr, is a popular journalist in both the Anglo and Hispanic local scenes, and, true to form, he introduced politics and immigration and read in Spanish and I was reminded that we were in Tucson, after all, and that multi-culturalism is under attack by so many folks here that I should just relax and open my mind to the newness and strangeness of it all.  And I was rewarded by Alberto Rios's love poem to his grandmother's long long hair, which reminded me of my grandmother's long long braid, and which put me in a very nice place, indeed.

Then Billy Collins read... and read... and read... and it was all his own work and it was wonderful. He wrote from the perspective of a dog who'd been put to sleep, and he riffed on the names of condo complexes and the inanities of conversations between teenage girls in between reflecting on his parents and aging and language.  Fogetfulness made me teary as his words brought G'ma to my heart, and then he was a young camper making a lanyard for his mother and every heart string of every parent was tugged and woven together, just as his lanyard was crafted.  Just as with a lanyard, we didn't know what practical purpose the afternoon would serve, but we loved it anyway.

I wish you could have been there with me.  It was really quite special.
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POEMS READ AT THE 50th ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA'S POETRY CENTER ON SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2010:

• A Poem Written by a Bear (Billy Collins)
• Social Security (Winch)
• The Laughing Heart (Charles Bukowski
• Elegy (N. Treadway)
• The End and the Beginning (Howard Altman)
• The Prune Tree (Howard Moss)
• Ulysses (excerpt, Tennyson)
• Moon Folly (Fanny Sterns Davis)
• The Windhover (Gerard Manley Hopkins)
• The Illegal Alien (a corrido written by a Tucson high school student)
• A Chance Witnessing (Alberto Rios)
• In the Strong Hold of Her Thin Arms (Alberto Rios)A

AND BY BILLY COLLINS:

• Litany
• Grave
• What She Said
• Oh My God
• The Death of a Hat
• The Dog on his Master
• The Revenant
• The Golden Years
• Adage
• Feedback
• Forgetfulness
• The Lanyard
• On Turning 10