Poems. Poems. Poems

Poetry gets no respect. Readers of poetry are somehow "different" and "strange" creatures. Maybe those elusive poetry readers were high-school rejects. Maybe poetry readers don't want to belong. Maybe they are never prom queens. Maybe poetry really belongs hidden in dark coffeehouses, where poets live and breed and strum acoustic guitars, safe from the light of clean, clear narrative life.

Or, on the other hand, maybe poetry is everyone. Maybe everyone, whether they know it or not, has been touched by poetry. The problem is not that poetry is disappearing: poetry lives always and (I'm willing to bet) in everyone. The problem is that people have stopped recognizing where their lives and poetry intersect. Sales of poetry are declining and declining in bookstores around the world. We are forgetting that poetry is in all of us.

Harvard is lucky to have a sizeable community of students devoted to reading, writing and generally appreciating poetry. I asked a number of people in the Harvard community why they thought poetry mattered, and received answers ranging from the bizarre statement of Hatim Belyamani '99, who claimed that poetry "is like a fermented milk shake. It can be cheesy but still quench your thirst" to Christian Lorentzen's '99 statement on the political power that poetry has had in the fight in Kosovo: "Epic poetry is one of the roots of the conflict in Kosovo. The Serb national epic immortalizes their defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Turks on the fields of Kosovo. That's why the Serbs have felt tied to the land even though the majority of the population is ethnic Albanian. Poetry can both commemorate and motivate war." Shawn Feeney '99 endearingly reminded me that "without poetry, there would be nothing to sing," and Sonesh Chainani '99 argued that poets are "just the beautiful people" not the "unacknowledged legislators of the world" as Bysshe Percy Shelley once claimed. Dan Chiasson, a teaching fellow in the English Department, responded to the question with a moving statement on the power of poetry to affect our innermost needs: "You ought to read poetry because there's nothing else in your life that can do the job poetry does. I'm not exactly sure what that job is, but I know, at least for me, that I need it done. Poetry offers a verbal form, an object made out of words, as compensation for urgent, but amorphous dilemmas: the "mess" of remembering joy amidst sorrow or of loving the wrong person or of grief. Of course it knows that its kind of compensation is immensely limited and circumscribed, that no mere poem will bring back childhood or a dead friend; such knowledge forces it back, time and again, on the only trick it knows: namely, constructing a gorgeous verbal contraption. The mystery is how such a contraption could ever work: but it does work, at least for the brief span of its operations, during (and just after) which "all losses are restored and sorrows end."

This April month of showers, flowers and fertile ground for inspiration is National Poetry Month, a perfect time for celebrating, reading, and experiencing poetry. So take advantage of the warming weather by strolling to the Grolier Poetry Bookstore, buying a book of poems from anywhere around the world, "flinging the emptiness out of your arms" and living for a few moments in an ethereal realm where language, meter and emotion meld in the surprising harmonies of poetry.