Every Poem An Epitaph            

      It's National Poetry Month in Canada-- has anyone noticed?-- and the question looms like a pigeon's feather in the distance: who will be the next Canadian Poet Laureate? I'm sure you're all on pins and needles in anticipation. Fact is, though, I think the idea of a Poet Laureate in Canada not a bad one, but, like poetry itself, it's getting little respect or attention and almost no money. I don't want to say -- and certainly do not want to believe-- that poetry is a dying form, but it's clearly being undermined by publishing houses that avoid it, audiences that flee from it, and academics that ignore it. We've become a very prosaic society, little concerned with methods of phrasing beyond the political parseable. A culture little interested in its own language and culture is a culture marking time, ignoring finer expressions of itself: no wonder we live in an MTV and CNN world of soundbytes and repetitions ad nauseum. I said in my post on Randall Jarrell that a culture is only as strong as its minor poets, and I still contend that's true. Unfortunately, most of our poets are either gimmicky (see, for example, Christian Bok's Eunoia, the principle of which was to write without using the letter "e") or agonizingly navel-gazing (or, as in the case of so many women poets, gyno-gazing) that we're increasingly removing poetry from the public sphere, and from the immediate relevance of poetry, much of which has to do with finding the right or the artful ways of saying things and putting them in peoples' mouths. Instead, much of our contemporary poetry is, for all intents and purposes, hermetically sealed from the public. (It also doesn't help that a lot of contemporary poets are also questionable thinkers, like Amiri Baraka who claimed that Jews had been warned to stay home from the World Trade Centre on September 11th.)

      With that in mind, it's about damned time we started -- or at least guys like me and anyone else foolhardy enough to agree with me-- to remind both poets and the public about the value of poetry in general. The prejudice against poetry in contemporary culture is one borne largely of ignorance: start with the basics, the hickory-dickory-docks and remind people that poetry, like music, is about rhythm and cadence and inflection, about the delight in words many have as children but lose as they age. We have to kill the notion of the poet as the ever-so-suffering artist or the namby-pamby-wannabe-intellectual or the severe intoner of all things ill in the world. Is this just poetic-populism? Perhaps, or at least it is in part. What it comes down to though is this: we have to invigorate the love of the well-turned phrase, the love of words themselves and communication as process. Literacy starts with poetry, I hate to remind everyone, with nursery rhymes and the like, with the forms of language that are most connected to music and to dance and to physical movement. This isn't absurd. Watch children skipping rope or playing hopscotch. They're not, I assure you, reciting the latest Harry Potter book as they do so. There's a reason most (all?) cultures develop poetry long before they develop prose or drama. It's the form with which we're most acquainted even if we don't realize it immediately. Listen to someone, anyone, speak, and you'll notice that very few them speak in prose per se, the logical unit of which is the sentence. The primary logical unit of the poem is the line, first and foremost, with breaks and caesurae marked along the way. This is the way we speak, except more often than not, we do not fully intend our breaks, and we often insert "ums" and "ers" where we'd otherwise pause. Sure, it's garbled poetry, and certainly not good poetry in most cases. But that is where we have to begin, with the realization of the persistent importance of poetry and poetic rhythms to our very notion of speech and communication. From there, my children, we can build. We begin by removing the Nobodaddy of impenetrability and irrelevance from poetry, and we go from there. That's what we need most in a Poet Laureate, someone who'll start that process and, ideally, lead by example. I'll get off my soap-box now, but first: Speakers of the world, unite, we have nothing to lose but our tin-ears.

      Check out, by the way, some of the poems available here, a collection put together by, among others, former American Poet Laureate (and one-time Simpsons guest) Robert Pinsky.