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Poetry In 1991, Dana Gioia asked "Can Poetry Matter?" Now, in "Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture"(Graywolf, 2002), he rejoices in the resurgence of poetry as a public and performance art. After Sept. 11, 2001, poets found the words to make sense of what had happened. Today, poetry is performed at slams and festivals, on radio and in audio books. Yet poetry does not make the best-seller lists. For many, it remains difficult, elusive and irrelevant. Billy Collins, a recent poet laureate, asserts in "Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry" (Random House, 2003), "the more poems you read, the more you are able to distinguish between valuable difficulty and willful obscurity." His "Sailing Alone Around the Room" (Random House, 2001) sold more than 100,000 copies, and he has become a modern bard, attracting large audiences to his readings. Robert Pinsky is also a familiar figure in popular culture. As poet laureate from 1997-2000, he asked Americans for their favorite poems. The result was his and Maggie Dietz’s anthology, "Americans’ Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology" (W.W. Norton, 2000). The project also created a video archive of poetry readings by Americans from all walks of life. Pinsky and Dietz followed this with an anthology for new poetry readers, "Poems to Read: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology" (Norton, 2002). Garrison Keillor describes "Good Poems" (Viking, 2002) as "simply a book of poems that got read over the radio … poems that somehow stuck with me." In his inimitable fashion, he chooses poems that "cut through the static," written by poets such as Emily Dickinson, who "can take your head off with one line," and offers his thoughts on what makes good poems matter. Harold Bloom, another literary celebrity, has just published what he terms "the anthology I’ve always wanted to possess" as "The Best Poems of the English Language" (HarperCollins, 2004), an authoritative, opinionated guide to his choice of great poems. Another selection by Roger Housden, "Ten Poems to Set You Free" (Harmony Books, 2003), is a slender volume containing 10 poems "to send a shudder through your bones," written by poets such as Rumi, Mary Oliver and Thomas Merton. The spoken-word movement celebrates the rhythms of everyday speech through performance poetry and poetry slams. "The Spoken Word Revolutions," edited by Mark Eleveld with an introduction by Billy Collins (Sourcebooks, 2003), includes an audio CD of poetry designed to be performed before an audience. "Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam," edited by Tony Medina and Louis Reyes Rivera (Three Rivers Press, 2001), is a collection of poems that focuses on the sound of the language and the jazz rhythms performed by urban youths. "Poetry Speaks" (Sourcebooks, 2001), edited by Elise Paschen and Rebekah Presson Mosby, contains three audio CDs of poets reading their own poetry, including Alfred Tennyson reading "The Charge of the Light Brigade" and Robert Frost reading "The Road Not Taken." Some poets’ lives dominate their work. Though Ted Hughes is best known as the unfaithful husband to Sylvia Plath, Paul Keegan demonstrates the brilliance of his work in "Ted Hughes: Collected Poems" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003). "Birthday Letters" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998) illustrates the couple’s intense, tumultuous relationship and how their poetry and lives entwined. Other recent examinations of their relationship include "Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and the Story of Birthday Letters" by Erica Wagner (W.W. Norton, 2000) and "Her Husband: Hughes and Plath - a Marriage" by Diane Middlebrook (Viking, 2003). The two "bad boys" of Romanticism, whose lives epitomized their poetry, are the subjects of "The Making of the Poets: Byron and Shelley in Their Time" by Ian Gilmore (Avalon, 2004). Harriet Rubin’s "Dante in Love" (Simon & Schuster, 2004) explains why Dante’s "Divine Comedy" still matters. |
