“Those things that have the name poetry, do you understand me?”
Some there are can’t stomach poetry – unpalatable the pretentious sugar and fat out of which poetry is whipped. But when we use the word poetry, what are we talking about? If we say we like music, what kind of music – polka, hip hop, electronica, diva pop? We might like some forms of music, dislike others, but rarely do we hear someone spout, “I disrelish music!” Why such animosity when it comes to poetry? Maybe the various forms of poetry are not as obvious to the common reader as the forms of music. Some music we enjoy, if not most, but do we get any kind of amusement, let alone rapture, from poetry? Hearing poetry, the curling monotones, the false mouthed sounds, is like eating raw oysters or anchovies, moldy cheese, mushrooms. But we might say we dislike opera, though we’ve never attended a live opera, while we’ve been unwittingly moved dozens of times by operatic scores in films; and our overstated displeasure with opera does not inhibit us from saying we love music. Opera, it might be argued, by the way, might be the most pretentious form of music, and financially, like poetry, has great difficulty digesting its own costs. But anyone can scribble a poem on the ubiquitous napkin; it takes a pro to echo “Mi Chiamano Mimi” without disturbing a neighbor’s evening meal. We might even try our hand at a few poems, but only to poke mullock, feeling pretentious otherwise, but to accuse one of pretension is a kind of conservatism, a keeping to class boundaries. All should feel free to whip up their own cupcake.
“Alone in a little white room, I see rooftops and sky.”
Others love poetry, but not all poetry, and in deference to the pros write very few poems. Poems must be full of light and air, like angel food cake. Here the word poetry refers to a small corner cafe with only four tables within and outside one table under an umbrella hung over the sidewalk. The sidewalk ends in a barrier curb of cement chipped from the days when horse drawn milk and ice carts with steel rim wheels rounded too close, and a rusted ball topped bollard sits on the corner – the skaters use it as a roundabout. Above the cafe, seven floors of once cold water walk-up bedsits, now each floor converted to a single luxury apartment. From the penthouse views of the river over rooftops, the sun through the morning bedroom balcony, the sun through the evening dining room floor to ceiling windows, the sun over the private patio roof. The penthouse throughout the day fills with enough light to power a casino, but there are no neighbors, the appendage sloping up and away into the awe-inspiring sky. But poems are born on the sidewalk, the margins of the city, and hardly any wind up in the sumptuous collection on the penthouse coffee table, but maybe that is simply a reflection of so much that has of course been lost and continues to disappear, like the neighbor who came unexpectedly to bother you for a cup of flour and stayed for a small glass of creme de menthe.
“That gentle perfume of a flower!”
Still others are indifferent to poetry. It remains a mystery, yet it’s used in so many places: the names of cars, greeting cards, commercials and advertisements, songs of all kinds. But naming cars is a silly practice, greeting cards are cloying, and many listeners prefer instrumentals. And you might think twice about what flowers you grow if you happen to be allergic to bee stings. And people don’t like to be fooled or to be made fools of, the province of much poetry, since the poet often has something to say that can only be said indirectly. Still, artificial flowers are nice, and can even be made to waft odor with a spray of floral scent. Flowers appear in spring, often in the most unlikely places – gutters, vacant lots, desert blooms; poems appear in spring too, in similar places – napkins, ice box notes, Easter egg wraps. According to a 2023 report by the National Endowment for the Arts, “Nearly 12 percent of U.S. adults read poetry or listened to it via media.” Doesn’t sound like many, but that’s roughly 30 million people reading poetry. I don’t know many of them. And it sounds like participation is on the decline:
“For starters, 18-to-24-year-olds, who, in 2017, exhibited the highest rate of poetry-reading of all age groups, lost half their share of the readership in 2022. That year, 9.0 percent read poetry, compared with 17.5 percent five years earlier….The other age group that experienced a major decline in poetry-reading, from 2017 to 2022, consisted of the nation’s oldest adults. The reading rate of those 75 years of age and older was 11.0 percent in 2017, and 7.1 percent in 2022.”
Survey, Size of Poetry’s Audience, Apr 6 2023, Retrieved 3 Apr 2024, National Endowment for the Arts.
“Alone, I eat. I miss mass, but I pray. Alone in my little white bedroom.”
Poetry offers community but also forms into cliques, coteries, cultish fads, but also for the lonely may remedy the lack of company. Secular poetry has offered some a substitute for missed religious passion, while the Bible is full of poetry, the Psalms, for example. Yet poetry can lead us astray. It is part of the tree, but it is not the tree. A nest built in the tree. We fall from the nest, and in our experience or reflection or just old age come to reject poetry, and the nest is empty, but we are free.
The Coming of the Toads 