Who Needs a Horse That Flies? Pt. III
Part I of this article can be found here; Part II can be found here.
If we review these various assumptions, definitions, and examples, it is possible to come up with some crucial insights. One is that we, unlike all other creatures, are able to imagine more than the obvious by seeing “through the eye.” This empowers us to distinguish the false from the true and to say so in such terms that others can feel what we are saying. For example, take the following short poem, called “Portrait of a House Detective,” by the great contemporary German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger. In this translation by Michael Hamburger, we have what seems like an unremarkable portrait of a somewhat eccentric and sloppy loner. He has built-in prejudices, peeves, and hatreds, and he comes across as one of those people one would be inclined to ignore. But by the time we finish the poem, we see that this loner was, in retrospect, not at all ignorable. His very peevishness eventually was secondary to his ultimate work in life, and the entire world paid for it.
he lolls in the supermarket
under the plastic sun,
the white patches on his face
are rage, not consumption,
a hundred packets of crispy crackers
(because they are so nourishing)
he sets ablaze with his eyes,
a piece of margarine
(the same brand as mine:
goldlux, because it’s so delicious)
he picks up with his moist hand
and squeezes it till it drips.
he’s twenty-nine,
idealistic,
sleeps badly and alone
with pamphlets and blackheads,
hates the boss and the supermarket,
communists, women,
landlords, himself
and his bitten fingernails
full of margarine (because
it’s so delicious), under
his arty hairstyle mutters
to himself like a pensioner.
that one
will never get anywhere.
wittler, i think, he’s called,
wittler, hittler, or something like that.
The absence of poetry from our daily discourse and our public life leaves a total vacuum because there is no substitute for it. Pretending that it is not essential or ignoring it entirely when it does appear is similar to situations when individuals or entire peoples choose to ignore weather reports. True, weather reports are not always correct, but even in their fallibility, they are without alternative in prognosticating weather. Dismissing or trivializing them can be seen as foolish or even fatal by those who have ignored tornado and tsunami warnings. In a certain sense, poems are like spiritual weather reports, and we ignore them to our peril.
Cassandra prophesying the fall of Troy and Cassandra at her death, from German translation by Heinrich Steinhöwel of Giovanni Boccaccio's De mulieribus claris, printed by Johannes Zainer, ca. 1474.
In 1963, President John Kennedy addressed this very subject in a speech at Amherst: “When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment. The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure… In pursuing his perception of reality, he must often sail against the current of his times. This is not a popular role.”
If these words are true as far as they go, why isn’t poetry a central presence in our public life? If poetry is human utterance in its most perfect form—felt thought feelingly expressed—why is it marginalized or overlooked entirely in public speech? The answers to both questions vary in their wrongness.
Some say that poetry is acceptable as long as it is “pleasant,” which is like saying that poetry should have the same relationship that Muzak has to music—tolerable as long as it stays soothingly in the background. Others say that poetry should remain at the Hallmark level—the detritus of emotional cliché. Still, others point to weddings, funerals, and certain honorific events and claim that poetry is often given a place in such proceedings. And this is true. But what passes for poetry then has usually been “written for the occasion.” Having heard many of these, I felt that they had been willed (and not inspired) into existence, proving repeatedly that true poems are rarely, if ever, created on demand.
To cite similar examples in the public domain, consider those times when poets were invited to recite at the presidential inaugurations of Kennedy, Carter, Clinton, and Obama—Robert Frost, James Dickey, Maya Angelou, Miller Williams, and Elizabeth Alexander. It was fortunate in retrospect that Frost was unable to read the versified treatise he had written for Kennedy’s inauguration because the January sun prevented him from seeing the text. Instead (and quite appropriately) he spoke from memory a previously written and infinitely better poem called “The Gift Outright.” Dickey and Williams, who are genuine poets by any standard, recited sincerely felt lines that were not in any way comparable to their best work.
Leaving inaugurations aside, why is it that audiences for “poetry hearings” are spare when compared to those for plays, operas, stand-up comedians, or the elaborate noise of rock concerts? Is it because we are a prose-and-screen oriented people who are so inundated daily with advertising copy, journalism, the propaganda of political jargon, and gossip that we have no eye or ear for poetry? Is it because noise has hidden poetic values that some of us are missing? Is it simply due to the fact that many poets who read well on the page do not recite well on the stage? Or is it because we have weak attention spans that are not up to what poetry demands? Is this the case in countries other than our own? Decades ago I was just completing a State Department-sponsored lecture tour to Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Greece. In Greece, I met the Nobel poet George Seferis (Georgios Seferiadis) before his appearance in the Greek Hellenic Union in Athens. Having served the government for much of his life out of Greece, Seferis faced a packed auditorium of people primed to hear their national poet for the first time in his own country. Loudspeakers were set up so that hundreds of people outside the Union could hear him, and thousands heard him in simultaneous broadcast throughout Greece. Such events do not happen in the United States.
George Seferis (Georgios Seferiadis) in 1929
But in Greece, the Arab countries, and throughout Europe, there is a built-in respect for poetic tradition, and this has consequences. Greece is a nation of 11.5 million people, but it has had only two Nobel awardees—Seferis and Odysseus Elytis. Ireland, a country of 4.5 million, has had three: William Butler Yeats, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney. The United States, with a population of 300 million, has had five—T. S. Eliot, Joseph Brodsky, Czesław Miłosz, Bob Dylan, and Louise Glück. Eliot was born in St. Louis, but became an Anglicized American. Brodsky and Miłosz wrote in their native languages, and I still have my doubts about Dylan and Glück. Who wrote in an American idiom? And why were such poets as Archibald MacLeish, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Richard Wilbur, Robert Lowell, William Stafford, and Randall Jarrell overlooked?
Perhaps Americans are indifferent to their poets because poets are genuine seers; they write and say what exists beneath appearances without verbiage or deceit. Like the Hebrew prophets, they do not write to please. I am speaking here of poets in fact and not in name—not versifiers, tiddly-rhymers, networkers, or charlatans. Americans who are susceptible to military vanity, particularly in our misguided wars from the fifties to the present moment, might modify their attitude after considering one of the consequences of war as described in the final line of Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”—“When I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose.” For those who want a glimpse of the commercial core of American civic life, I would offer Robert Lowell’s conclusion to “For the Union Dead” with its terse description of traffic in downtown Boston: “A savage servility/slides by on grease.” And then there is Louis Simpson’s “To the Western World,” whose final lines read like an epitaph: “The generations labor to possess/and grave by grave we civilize the ground.” And what about William Stafford’s inserted couplet in “Religion Back Home” that makes us smile before we see all wars from Troy to our present as tragic and illegal adventurism in Stafford’s semi-playful words: “Our Father Who Art in Heaven/Can lick their Father Who Art in Heaven.” And finally, there is an indicting couplet by e. e. cummings that is not without merit: “A politician is an arse upon/which everyone has sat except a man.”
These are only a handful of examples I have selected to demonstrate the constant relevance of poetry to public life and public speech. The books from which they are drawn are out there and available. And there are thousands of others throughout the world from the time of the Sumerians to right now. If we refuse to read and share them, who can deny that we will be the poorer for it?
Samuel Hazo is the founder of the International Poetry Forum, which he directed for 43 years. A National Book Award finalist and inaugural poet laureate of Pennsylvania, Hazo is the author of nearly 60 books, including his latest book of poetry, Becoming Done, and book of essays, Who Needs a Horse That Flies?: Essays on Poetry and Pretense, which is the source of this article.