I am quite fortunate to have received such a thoughtful response as Jim Murdoch’s about my dissent from National Poetry Month. I must concede he’s quite correct that few if any of us start off our literary lives drinking the strongest elixir from Mount Helicon. Most if not all of us need some gateway drink before the full addiction sets in. Certainly, this principle applies to me as much as to anyone else. I have written elsewhere on the web about my early years as a reader and writer of poetry: “Back in high school I loved William Cullen Bryant’s ‘ ‘Thanatopsis,’ and I made a habit of sitting at the river front reading Carl Sandberg and composing verses of my own. Sometimes I wrote lines of my poetry in the sand so that the tide of the Ohio River could wash them away. I was so romantic a young man as to be a danger to myself and others, and probably should have been institutionalized” (www.thecommonspace.org/2003/01/expatriates.php). Of course, Sandberg and Bryant were figures I was learning about in my high school literature courses, to which I applied myself very lightly if at all. Somehow I thought the river would supply the education that I needed. It was not until college that I decided to take school more seriously, and my literary life came to be all about Donne, Dickinson, and T. S. Eliot, among others.
In his response to my dissent, Murdoch even makes a rather generous gesture that–I take it–there is perhaps at least a little something to my thoughts: “I would take National Poetry Month with a pinch of salt though and maybe a tequila to go with that.” If I read the comment correctly, he certainly maintains his disagreement with me while also pointing out, in the texture of this image of strong drink, that there might be something to my case, even if I overstate it in the making. In response I must concede that there is something to take quite seriously in Murdoch’s case, and I concede not merely out of good manners (though I seek to be as mannerly as I can), but out of conscience and the concern to be as true as I can to the case at hand.
After all, it is quite true that initiates into poetry need some texts and teaching to get them started. My initiation came from those high school classes that I slumbered through by no one’s fault but my own. Whatever little I could take in, given my somnolent state, turned out to be enough, at least for me. Perhaps the events of National Poetry Month will serve in a similar way to any number of other devotees. If so, this is fine. Where I remain skeptical is in the matter of carry-through and carrying on. At least my early educaton was constantly pointing beyond the texts that I was taking in, pointing beyond Bryant and Sandberg to Milton, Pope, and Wordsworth, to Dickinson, Stevens, Bishop, and Lowell. If National Poetry Month can point the way in a such a manner, then I think it’s all to the good.
But then another issue I take is the idea that more people in our culture need to be reading poetry. I’m not so sure that this is the case. Please don’t get me wrong, I feel that all should be welcome, as all should be welcome who are interested in experiments in painting, theater, sculpture, and music. It’s vital for a living culture to make the unique experiences available through such arts open for any who would show up, though I don’t know how vital it is for everyone to become devotees; there are after all many ways to form one’s sensibilities, perceptions, and sense of the world. Poetry is a way I have found especially vital for me and any number of others, but I would never insist it is a way for everyone to follow. For me here is the bottom line: any popularization of an art is fine as long as it does not compromise the integrity of the art or work against the art’s good name. I remain a bit suspicious that the goings-on of National Poetry Month–and even Murdoch points out that “a lot of what gets posted is dire”–quite allows us to serve poetry as well as we might.
On the other hand, I have made it one of my life’s projects not to become a curmudgeon (hence the appearance of the term in my title). There are people posted around the country to whom I’ve given explicit instructions to the effect that if they ever hear of me talking about the decline of civilization, how “these kids today” just aren’t with it as we were, how nobody cares anymore about goodness, truth, and beauty, they are to bludgeon me with the nearest blunt object. One issue that I must confront is that with all of my talk about the strength and integrity of poetry, it is actually Jim Murdoch who holds greater belief in the power of the art. If great poetry is really as strong as I believe it to be, then it will endure whatever might be dire in the national observance. When I find myself concerned about poetry as if it were a delicate and fragile thing, then I should probably think again because there is no doubt somewhere that I am wrong. Thus, even if I shall continue to sit out April’s national observance of verse, I should probably do so without talking about it, lest I become the curmudgeon I certainly don’t want to be.