When we consider what enables a poem to endure, it’s easy to side with immediate fatalism and shoulder-shrugging, or opt for broad-brushed faith in long-term aesthetic exceptionalism and artistic meritocracy, without really considering the everyday physical life and (half-life) of poetry, and what we can do as individuals and communities to nourish and preserve poetry where it lives.
I’ve been thinking recently about poetry’s dual incarnations—how we live poetry, and how poetry outlives us.
After his death, Miklós Radnóti’s poetry lived for eighteen months in a mass grave. During her imprisonment, Irina Ratushinskaya’s poetry lived scratched into bars of soap before she etched them in her memory and washed them away. And then? These authors’ poems, and the poems of all authors dead and living, still live in the minds of a readership because someone then shepherded them “into history.” As individuals and communities, we write, and read, and print, and publish, and record, and recite, and distribute, and curate, and organize, and stage, and perform, and shelve, and archive, and restore, and house, and circulate, and champion, and teach, and study, and share, and photocopy, and discuss, and memorize, and anthologize, and analyze, and digitize. Our participation in the life of poetry is the life of poetry.
Of course, this power to preserve is also the power to destroy. We are all familiar with the extreme manifestations of this destruction—book-burning, censorship, intimidation, imprisonment, murder. While remaining vigilant and vocal against these clear and present horrors, perhaps we can also consider the benign neglect through which poetry withers and fades. To archive is to say: this has value. To teach is to say: this has value. And so on.
Last Thursday, my “Creating the Chapbook” students visited Gabrielle Dean, Curator of Literary Rare Books and Manuscripts at Johns Hopkins University’s Sheridan Libraries. They saw and read and touched broadside ballads and fine press books and small press books and artists’ books. Dean encouraged my students and I to let her know if we had recommendations for acquisitions. This is a less dramatic way of reminding us that we have the power to preserve what we value—but that drama is still inherent.
On Saturday, these same students and I attended the opening of the Baltimore Poetry Library in the Liberal Arts and Policy Building at the University of Baltimore and browsed through Baltimore literary ephemera and one-off or limited edition book arts specimens shelved alongside Homer, Keats, and Dickinson. UB’s Klein Family School of Communications Design has become the permanent home for a collection gathered by Christophe Casamassima and Doug Mowbray over thirteen years, moving from private basements to the Towson Arts Collective to LitMore. The Baltimore Poetry Library’s over 6,000 volumes makes it the largest single collection of poetry in the Mid-Atlantic region.
In between those two events, on Friday evening, my “Poetry & Social Justice” students attended the Black Words Matter Write-In organized by Writers in Baltimore Schools. Where Thursday and Saturday’s visits focused on the enduring life of poetry in the archive, this event focused on the voiced life of poetry in action. Over one hundred high school students, college students, and community members gathered at Red Emma’s to write, read, critique, celebrate, and witness.
At these events, news spread of the fire that burned through The Book Thing in the early morning hours of Wednesday, March 2, along with news of fundraising and volunteer efforts. The gorgeous contradiction of The Book Thing—here was a place that valued literature so much that it gave it away for free.
And before all this, late in the evening on Monday, March 1, after the announcement that Carl Phillips had chosen Airea D. Matthews as the winner of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets for her manuscript simulacra, Matthews posted a public message on her Facebook page:
Dear You and You and You …,
I’m incredibly grateful. Immensely touched by the calls, texts, emails and FB posts. Humbled by this and you. Been crying most of the day. Thank you for your enormous love and well wishes.
XoD
PS—Margaret Walker was the first and last Black woman to win the Yale and that was in 1942, 74 years ago. She also had four kids and a creative practice and a household and a career. Do me a solid? If you get a chance, please read some of her work. The dead greats only die if we don’t read them.
Margaret Walker’s “For My People” from the November 1937 issue of Poetry begins as follows:
The work of lending strength, of preserving, of nourishing, goes on. The work of book conservators like Martha Edgerton at places like the Pratt Library Bindery “lends strength” to voices on the page. The work of writers and organizers like Analysis (Ken Brown) at places like Red Emma’s “lends strength” to the community’s voices aloud. Ask yourself what you preserve—how you value with your words, your attention, your presence.