The Cruelest (and Coolest) Month

Others see the political potential of poetry. Sam Hamill, founder of Copper Canyon Press in Washington State, last year started Poets Against the War, a group of poets who protested, and continue to speak out against, the U.S.-led war on Iraq. "The subject of poetry is character. How can you examine character without examining a political aspect, even sort of peripherally?" he asks. "Show me a great poet any time in history who is apolitical." Hass explains poetry's political "trickle down theory. It's hard to imagine that the New Deal would ever have happened without Walt Whitman," he says. Poetry and politics were also intertwined at The Academy of American Poets reading last week too: Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," made a last-minute change to the program and read Joseph Brodsky's bone-chilling "Bosnia Tune" to mark the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and academy co-chair Jorie Graham concluded the reading with an exhortation: "For every lie we're told by advertisers and politicians, we need one poem to balance it."

Just as poetry mingles with politics, it also goes surprisingly well with money. Last year's benefit raised some $180,000 for the academy's Web site and various programs. "The romantic notion that poetry and money don't mix is simply that: romantic," says Swenson, the academy's executive director. "Like the other arts, poetry and its makers need support-from audiences, venues, and arts organizations. In this culture, philanthropic support for poetry provides nowhere near an amount to match the immense value of great poems." And that's the rub with poetry, any month of the year: Emily Dickinson never had any philanthropic support (or, for that matter, a National Poetry Month) and died unknown in 1886. But that didn't stop her, just as hip-hop would grow up spontaneously a century later on devastated streets. The best living poet today may be toiling in total obscurity much like Dickinson did in her time, stopping to write the occasional observation that "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it."

© 2004