The Place of Poetry

Last week I went to a local poetry reading featuring Robert Pinsky. I've had the privilege of working with him on a new edition of poems by the mid-century Greek poet C.P. Cavafy, and I wanted the opportunity to see him in person.

I have to confess that when I got to the auditorium, I was startled. I looked around the room and wondered: where did all these people come from? The seats had filled up and the room teemed with an artistic breed rarely found in Princeton: trench-coated writers and scholars, clutching messenger bags crammed with books that had been generously thumbed through. People were rustling with excitement, murmuring lines and bandying favorite titles. I located myself in a corner and watched with wide eyes.

The thing about Princeton (that you learn when you've lived here) is that it's not a real college town. Though it hosts a remarkable faculty and recruits gifted students, it lacks the buzz and palpable energy of an intellectual community. I rarely feel, in walking about this campus, that it's a place that nourishes the love of ideas, the desire to grapple with artistic or political concepts and to wring new truths out of them. What I am aware of is the insistent drive to achieve and to excel--not unworthy goals by any means, but somewhat soulless when the results are all but intellectual. To be intellectual is to be unproductive, it would seem.

It's little wonder that artistic communities are so hard to find--and that they're often centralized into a few major hubs across the U.S. When so much creative content is mediated by the candied lens of MTV, the kind of creative output that forces you to think and to be mentally and psychologically engaged gets completely marginalized. Maybe this is why poetry is so poorly received in America. Somehow this culture has forgotten that verse is one of the purest and most lyrical means of expressing the human condition.

Even Robert Pinsky, who gave by far the most genial reading I've experienced, acknowledged his appeal as that of "a lounge act." He laced his performance with humor, keeping up a steady Jay Leno-esque banter, and inviting the audience to call out favorite pieces for him to read. He quoted lovingly from poets such as Ben Jonson, and invoked the musical genius of Charlie Parker and the earliest saxophonists. On a mission to revive public interest in poetry, he was willing to sing for his supper.

As it was, I laughed and clapped him out of the room until my palms stung, but I was also left to ponder the state of things around me. Why aren't universities churning out as many poets and philosophers as engineers and economists? Why are we at the point at which our poets need to do stand-up just to be heard? Can verse no longer dazzle on its own merits? When did poetry need to be anything more than what it is: lines, crafted by human hands and human minds, that lead us on a pilgrimage to the site of our inner selves. A poem is a journey that doesn't need embellishment. What it does need - as Pinsky intuited long before I did - is more pilgrims.

ANTIQUE by Robert Pinsky, from Gulf Music

I drowned in the fire of having you, I burned

In the river of not having you, we lived

Together for hours in a house of thousand rooms

And we were parted for a thousand years.

Ten minutes ago we raised our children who cover

The earth and have forgotten that we existed

It was not maya, it was not a ladder to perfection,

It was this cold sunlight falling on this warm earth.

When I turned you went to Hell. When your ship

Fled the battle I followed you and lost the world

Without regret but with stormy recriminations.

Someday far down that corridor of horror the future

Someone who buys this picture of you for the frame

At a stall in a dwindled city will study your face

And decide to harbor it for a little while longer

From the waters of anonymity, the acids of breath.