The Cruelest (and Coolest) Month

Jazz June. We

Die soon."

Or Marianne Moore's "Poetry," which was read by actor Kevin Kline:

"I, too, dislike it.

Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine."

Every poet interviewed for this piece-all of whom conceded that the notion of a National Poetry Month was at least a little silly-emphasized both time and timelessness when explaining why poetry matters. "Imagine that you lived in a culture where there had never been a re-creation in powerful words of life of the past, of feeling," says Helen Vendler, a poetry scholar at Harvard University. "You would be living in what [Wallace] Stevens called a landscape of the dead, where no one had ever lived before you ... What would it be like to live in such a culture?" Former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky writes in an e-mail interview that poetry "fills a human appetite: it matters the way cuisine matters beyond nutrition, or lovemaking matters beyond procreation. Like music and dance, it is at the center of human intelligence." Former Poet Laureate Robert Hass points to the emergence hip-hop as a "pure eruption of out of the oral tradition of poetry; it's kind of fascinating because not only did it come out of the oral traditions but it came out of the worst school districts in the country. As an argument for 'do people need poetry?' go devastate their school systems."