The Cruelest (and Coolest) Month

T.S. Eliot was perhaps on to something when he wrote, "April is the cruelest month." The line comes, of course, from his 1922 epic The Wasteland and, no, he wasn't talking about taxes. According to a brief Web search, April is Math Awareness Month, National Landscape Architecture month, International Guitar Month, Keep America Beautiful Month, National Humor Month and National Welding Month, among many, many others. One might think poor Eliot, one of the greatest poets of the past 100 years, runs the risk of getting lost in the shuffle: April is also National Poetry Month.

Don't pity T.S. yet. Earlier this week, hundreds of Manhattanites happily paid between $35 and more than $400 to watch Meryl Streep, Diane Sawyer, Wynton Marsalis, Kevin Kline and other A-list stars read their favorite poems at the Lincoln Center during a benefit for The Academy of American Poets, which launched National Poetry Month in 1996. "By buying a ticket tonight, you are supporting our programs and helping with this work-which is so important because everyone owns poetry, not just poets," Tree Swenson, the academy's executive director, told the audience.

It is one thing to pack a New York house with well-heeled patrons when the draw is top talent reading good poems. But if everyone really does own poetry, does the country really need to share National Anxiety Month with it? Does dedicating April to "poetry" demean the art by treating it glibly, or does spreading the gospel of verse convince people who wouldn't otherwise read poetry to glance at a few stanzas? The country's leading poets are themselves divided on the topic.

"I'm an elitist pig," Richard Howard tells NEWSWEEK, only half-joking. "If your story's about National Poetry Month, I think you'd be better off speaking to someone else." Howard-poetry editor of the Paris Review, Pulitzer Prize-winner and MacArthur "genius" grant recipient-in the keynote speech at the 1996 PEN Literary Awards, called the newly launched National Poetry Month a "deleterious development ... which I have no hesitation in calling the worst thing to have happened to poetry since the advent of the camera and the internal combustion engine, two inventions that W.H. Auden once declared to be the bane of our modernity." Poetry, he tells NEWSWEEK, is to be enjoyed "in secret," privately, on a personal level-not read in bites on billboards and subway placards. And if poetry gets a bad rap for being too difficult, too elitist, so be it, he says.

But not everyone feels that way. Billy Collins, the former U.S. Poet Laureate and current New York State Poet whose books enjoy the anomalous distinction of outselling many top novels, tells NEWSWEEK that poetry is too often treated "like trigonometry with words. The implication [of a National Poetry Month] is that it's neglected the rest of the year." And neglected it isn't: In 2003 alone 1,612 poetry and poetry-related books were published, according to Poets House, a poetry archive in New York. In 1994 that number was 969. Still, that doesn't mean it always sells. "It's just not one of our more popular categories," writes Amazon's Brad Thomas Parsons in an e-mail. "Some titles do pop into our Top 100 from time to time-contemporary poets like Billy Collins or Mary Oliver, or pop poetry like 'The Prophet' ... High profile awards also help: 'Walking to Martha's Vineyard' [by Franz Wright] just won the Pulitzer and spiked to No. 227 a day after the awards were announced."

Which invites the question: What do people want from their poetry? Collins is alternately lauded and derided for writing accessible poetry that is occasionally touching and often quite funny. "I have a theory that poetry should be like an eye chart in your ophthalmologist's office," he says. The first big 'E' should be easy to read, drawing the reader in. Only then should it become increasingly "mysterious." Take, for example, Gwendolyn Brooks' 1966 poem "We Real Cool," which was read by designer Cynthia Rowley at the New York fundraiser this week: