Preface (excerpt)

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I believe that most people have little trouble reading a poem,

that most people like poetry, that most people crave the pure

pleasure of poems, and that most people want a poem that’s not

too obvious. Human beings admire mastery. We enjoy hearing an

extremely talented musician play difficult music. We love watching

an elite athlete—like a world-class diver nailing a high degree-ofdifficulty

twisting and somersaulting dive with no more splash than a

teardrop.

 

And we thrill at the triumphs of the poet who, like a sculptor,

transforms the rough marble of everyday language into a sculptured

poem of human aspiration.

 

Mastery arouses us because doing something difficult is a hard

thing to do.

 

In late 2002, Oregonian books editor Jeff Baker and I met in

Portland to bandy around the idea of a monthly poetry column, in

lieu of conventional poetry reviews, in the Sunday books section of

the state’s major newspaper. I came armed with what I hoped was an

apt metaphor about poetry and difficulty. In particular—and because

I knew that prior to being the paper’s books editor Jeff had once been

a sports reporter—I opted for a sports metaphor.

 

“I see myself as being, you know, like John Madden, the football

color commentary guy,” I said. “Anyone can follow the game but John

Madden’s experience brings you closer to the complex game beneath

the game. He brings you closer both to the game and to the sport.”

 

I went on in this fashion, though I needn’t have. Because we both

understood that just as John Madden shows viewers the Xs and Os

of each play, what went well, what broke down, and just as he covers

the history of the formations, who the players and coaches are and

what he thinks matters most about the past, present, and future of

the sport of football, and just as he brings his values about the art

and practice of football, and just as he models watching football in a

reliable, enjoyable, and insightful manner, my intention with a poetry

column was to be like the chalkboard talk for what poetry is and how

it works, to reflect upon what I think matters most for readers and

writers of poetry, from the beginner to the student to the experienced

poet.

 

I needn’t have worried. Jeff Baker already wanted to expand coverage

of poetry in the books section. He was actively commissioning

reviews of new collections and had also started a feature to publish

original poems each week. Few, if any, newspaper books editors

have been a better friend to the poets than Jeff Baker, whose editorial

generosity to me was offered with expertise, good sense, and a quiet

directness. Following that lunch meeting began a monthly ritual that

lasted from January 2003 to the fall of 2013, in which I would send

Jeff a short commentary, essay, or reflection on the art of poetry, and

would receive in reply a salutary, “Thanks, David.”

 

Readers responded more volubly.

 

Some took the reflections and the lines of poetry to heart. A

woman once called my house to say that she was so delighted by

Muriel Rukeyser’s “In Her Burning”—a poem about an old woman’s

randiness—that she was going to bring it to her book group. “The

ladies will love it!”

 

Others said they pinned up the columns on their refrigerators.

Many teachers wrote to say they posted the columns and poem on

the cork boards in their classrooms.

 

One Saturday afternoon at a local park, a regular reader thrust

Robert Frost’s “To Earthward” into my hands at our two sons’ fourth

grade soccer game. The boys had played on the same team since

kindergarten, and they would continue playing together through high

school. There was a strange cultural peculiarity going on in that

moment in Southeast Portland on the sidelines of the soccer field—as

other parents were shouting at kids to kick and chase the ball, she was

waving her rumpled copy of the poem at me and demanding, “Could

Frost be this dark?”

 

I answered her in my next piece.

 

The complaints piled up, too. One reader tried to convince me

that poetry didn’t deserve such attention—even monthly—declaring,

“Only schoolmarmish, gray-haired biddies care about poetry.”

 

I took that personally.

 

Gray-haired? Not yet, pal.

 

Schoolmarmish? Okay, well, you got me there . . .

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The first piece of prose I ever wrote about poetry in a daily newspaper

was in 1989 for the Book World section of The Washington Post.

Aggravated by what I took to be an insipid poetry review the Post had

recently published, I wrote to the editor, Michael Dirda, to offer my

services as a reviewer and pitched him on some new books.

 

This was audacious of me. I was 25 years old. I had only been

writing poems for three years, ever since I’d resolved to hammer out

my life as a poet. I had never written a book review before.

 

“How do I know you’re not married to one of these people?” Dirda

asked in a subsequent phone call before assigning, on speculation only,

a roundup of five books different from the ones I’d proposed. These included

new collections by Lucille Clifton, James Dickey, and Louise

Glück. Thus my career writing about poetry in newspapers began.

 

Years after I wrote those first reviews for The Washington Post—and

later for the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, as well

as for literary quarterlies—Jeff Baker and I cooked up the idea of a

newspaper column in the Oregonian about poetry. I leaped at the

chance to shift my role from reviewer to columnist.

 

Though I can’t say I aspired to become a newspaper poetry columnist.

My primary interest is, has always been, the writing of poems.

Writing prose about poetry, in my case at least (and this may be true

for others), has sometimes helped to keep the silence between writing

poems at bay and to help me, as I said before, think through my

preoccupations about the art of poetry. Over time, to be fair, I’ve been

grateful to have the column in the Oregonian. It’s been like a piece of

real estate in the literary neighborhood to return to with regularity

and talk to a loyal readership about the art of poetry.

 

When I stepped down from writing the column, it was a private

decision and one I’d been mulling for some time. After more than ten

years and over a 120 columns, I wanted to stop before I ran the risk, if

I’d not done so already, of becoming dull, rote, or shrill. The decision

had nothing to do with the Oregonian and only a little to do with the

dwindling audience for daily newspapers or the diminished size of

the books section. What I mean is, during my time, the newspaper

allowed me complete freedom to write about poetry in a manner that

interested me. Often I would be asked by readers if the newspaper ever

forbade me from writing something or writing about any particular

poet or insisted that I write about any particular poet. No, never, not

once. And so I hold with the view that newspapers and general interest

publications ought to provide a discussion of poetry on the same pages

as its coverage of civic, political, lifestyle, and sporting life. That the

thrill of victory and the agony of defeat of both the world of sports

and the world of the sonnet might exist side by side epitomizes the

ideal, as William Carlos Williams once said, that “poetry is news that

stays news.”

 

Anyone can be a critic of new poetry. It’s easy as burning down a

barn. The vast majority of contemporary poetry of any era is usually

forgettable and soon forgotten. The real challenge for a writer about

poetry is to try to figure out how a poem works the way it does and

why it might defy the historical odds. Or at least to try to figure out

how a poem defines—at the very least, characterizes and, at the very

best, mythologizes—our time.

 

All the same, I’m uncertain about what influence a poetry column

has. For me, the whole point of writing about poetry was less about

trying, presumptuously or foolishly, to shape the literary landscape

than to help stimulate some conversation about poems, poets, and

poetry, and about the role these play in a modern civilized city and

nation, and beyond. I’ve tried to explain, from my perspective, who

poets are, how poems work, how the art got the way it is, and what

all that might mean or lead to.

from "Preface: Thrill at the Triumphs"