Absent all answers, poetry necessary

By James Coleman
Sun contributor
This piece was originally published in the Norwich Bulletin and submitted to the Glen Arbor Sun by Mr. Coleman, a close friend of Norman Wheeler, a local poet who runs the Beach Bards Bonfire, which meets every Friday at dusk from June 20 until Labor Day weekend on the Leelanau School beach just north of Glen Arbor.

We don’t need poetry if we have all the answers. Every poem is an investigation of a human problem, where the poet invites us to look over his or her own shoulder as he or she tries to express an important truth, an important insight that can’t be said in any other way.
Dr. Phil can’t get at it; Pat Buchanan is at a loss for words. A poet, in short, is needed.
Robert Frost was often asked what he meant by his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” He always claimed, “If I could have said it any other way, I would have.” We return to poems as part of our cultural heritage because they way what cannot be otherwise expressed.
William Carlos Williams tries to capture this quality of poems in “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” when he tells us “It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there.”
Here Williams argues that some of life’s essentials can be found only in “despised poems,” as he calls them. “Hear me out!” he says to the reader.
Williams raises an interesting problem when he asks us to hear him out: the problem of access. If we don’t know where to find poetry, we can’t hear him or any poet; we can’t “hear him out.”
Unfortunately, I have to tell you that the chance of poetry reaching your ears is diminishing. Community poetry readings are being painted as irrelevant, and funding is being withdrawn.
The Connecticut Humanities Council Cultural Heritage program has had its entire budget cut for next year. The National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Public Radio are slated for elimination by prominent members of Congress, according to recent e-mail petitions. Library funding, both state and local, has been cut.
TV dotes on retired generals
I have not heard of any plans to cut the number of retired generals appearing on television. I enjoy listening to the retired generals, but their dominance in the media was highlighted by a claim made by Robert Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer, that the media did not cover the environmental issues raised by Bush administration initiatives. He said that his organization, the Natural Resources Defense Council, had asked him to step forward as its spokesperson because his celebrity might gain him access to the media.
Other environmental experts had no hope of gaining access. That seemed to be the case on the show I was watching, “Buchanan & Press.”
Access is an important issue. If critics of administration environmental policy cannot get a hearing, vital issues may not be debated. Kennedy’s strongest example was the catastrophic rise in childhood asthma, and its relation to air quality and the policies affecting it.
How does the analogy extend then to poetry? Do poets get time or access to policy makers? Should they? What do they have to offer?
Laura Bush had scheduled a “Celebration of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes” for Feb. 12 at the White House. When informed that some poets felt disquiet about the upcoming war, she cancelled the event, with the comment: “American Literature is not political.”
Was the White House action political? Did the White House action influence network coverage of poets’ views on the war by signaling the White House position? Does it matter?
Here we return to Dr. Williams. “It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably ever day/ for lack/ of what is found there.”
I defer to the West Pointers on military issues, but I think the poets may have empowering ideas about love, justice and other deep human issues that we need to hear.
Poetry may live, as W.H. Auden put it, “in the valley of its saying.” Yet after the tragedy of September 11, his poem “September 1, 1940” circulated widely on the Internet. Its language expressed something for people about the otherwise sad, turbulent and confused emotions with which they had to contend.
Will we be the richer for deciding now that poetry does not matter?
Mr. Coleman of Norwich, professor emeritus of Three Rivers Community College, is a scholar, writer and editor. This column comprises his introductory remarks, “Does Poetry Matter?”, delivered April 27 at the Community Poetry Reading.