National Poetry Month: How and why I celebrate
(Read article summary)Based on my own experience, I still think of television as an especially powerful tool in raising poetry’s profile.
After graduating from college and escaping the demands of required reading, I didn’t expect to encounter much poetry. I’d studied to be a journalist, after all, a profession in which writers are encouraged to say exactly what they mean. Poets, who had a habit of writing in riddles, seemed an unlikely source of inspiration for my new work and life.
But less than a year after leaving campus, while home alone recovering from minor surgery, I got bored enough to watch a public television documentary about Elizabeth Bishop. It was part of “Voices and Visions,” a landmark 1988 series about major American poets that featured Bishop, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman and many others.
Still groggy from pain pills, I drifted in and out of sleep while actress Blythe Danner lent her elegant voice to such affecting Bishop poems as “Questions of Travel” and “The Moose.” Bishop had a genius for capturing the alternately liberating and confining strangeness of being human, and listening to her stanzas drift over my sofa, I felt an odd sense of levitation. But then again, as I told myself at the time, maybe this had more to do with my drug-addled brain than Bishop’s peculiar art.
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A few days later, with my health restored and my head now clear, I headed to the bookstore to get a copy of Bishop’s collected poems and see if her magic endured. Happily, Bishop’s poetry continued to charm me, and reading her work led me to other poets, including Frost, Marianne Moore, Pablo Neruda, and Donald Hall. Thus began a love affair with poetry that’s lasted more than two decades, and I owe it all to television.
