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CARL:
Can poetry change the world?
There is ample evidence that it has in the past.
Poems inspire everything from religious fervour to revolution,
patriotism to global diversity. Poetry
both reflects its subject matter and changes it.
But art became more complex in the latter half of the 20th
century with the rise of advertising and of escapist entertainment.
Images, fashions, trends, and brandings interact with creative
expression and bombard our senses.
Artists find themselves competing with a number of sensations
designed to capture our attention and move us toward specific thoughts,
feelings and actions. Every
advertisement we encounter uses creative expression to encourage us to
change, at the very least, our buying habits.
At the same time advertisements reinforce many existing social
expectations.
The Beat novelist, William S.
Burroughs, wrote,
Quote, Artists to my
mind are the real architects of change, and not political legislators,
who implement change after the fact.
Art exerts a profound influence on the style of life, the mode,
range and direction of perception.
Art tells us what we know and don’t know that we know, close
quote.
Burroughs wrote this passage
nearly 50 years ago. He
wrote before Andy Warhol made soup cans a work of art.
He wrote before music videos and burnable CDs and the Internet.
Is his assertion still true?
Can art still create social change?
PATTIE:
The poet, Audre Lorde once
lamented the loss of an avenue of expression for poor women – the
poetry section of the so-called “ladies’ magazines.”
Poetry is the most available expression of art for the poor, she
asserted, because it requires the least amount of technology to produce. Imagination and a pencil and piece of scrap paper at the
dining room table after the children have gone to bed is all that is
needed to be a poet. Ladies’
magazines used to publish submissions of poetry from women in the back
of each issue. Here was a
place for even the poorest of women to express their thoughts and
feelings. Poetry, she
asserted, is not a luxury for women’s expressions.
But Lorde hit the nail right on the head in pointing out that
publication of poetry is an important aspect of that expression.
Who gets heard and who doesn’t
get heard is a political and social phenomenon.
If poetry is an avenue of social change, then publication of that
poetry is an avenue of social maintenance and, some would say,
staleness.
CARL:
On today’s show, we offer a
series of readings from the Academy of American Poets’ online
listening room. We have
chosen these poets because they represent poetry that has not only been
published but is now taught in schools around the world. In many ways,
these are the acceptable poets and that makes them less
threatening. But some of
them weren’t so acceptable in their own time. Some of these poets are acceptable now because they dared to
be different then.
PATTIE:
e.e. cummings experimented
radically with form, punctuation, spelling and syntax, abandoning
traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly
idiosyncratic means of poetic expression.
Later in his career he was often criticized for settling into his
signature style and not pressing his work towards further evolution.
Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among
young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful style and
his attention to subjects such as war and sex.
[[insert “why
must itself up every of a park”]]
CARL:
W.H. Auden’s 1930 collection Poems
established him as the leading voice of a new generation.
Ever since then, he has been admired for his unsurpassed
technical virtuosity and an ability to write poems in nearly every
imaginable verse form, for the incorporation in his work of popular
culture, current events, and vernacular speech, and for the vast range
of his intellect, which drew easily from an extraordinary variety of
literatures, art forms, social and political theories, and scientific
and technical information. His
poetry frequently recounts, literally or metaphorically a journey or
quest, and his travels provided rich material for his verse.
Auden was born in the United Kingdom and was made Poet Laureate
of that nation, but he spent most of his life in the United States.
[[insert “On
the Circuit”]]
PATTIE:
Gwendolyn
Brooks was an African-American poet who wrote more than twenty books of
poetry and numerous other books, including a novel and an autobiography.
Her style captured her experiences growing up and living in
Chicago where she stayed until her death in 2000 at the age of 83.
[[insert “We
Real Cool”]]
CARL:
Allen Ginsberg was one of the
founding members of what came to be known as the Beat generation.
His first published poem, Howl, overcame censorship to
become one of the most widely read poems of the century.
Ginsberg studied under gurus and Zen masters.
He went on to co-found and direct the Jack Kerouac School of
Disembodied Poetics in Colorado.
[[insert “A
Supermarket in California”]]
PATTIE:
Anne Sexton suffered greatly
from postpartum depression, having breakdowns after each of her two
children’s births. Upon
advice of her doctor, after an attempted suicide in 1957, she decided to
pursue poetry as a way to get out of her depression.
In poetry she found an expression that helped her endure life. However, she succumbed to the depression and committed
suicide in 1974 at the age of 46. Sexton
offers the reader an intimate view of the emotional anguish that
characterized her life. She
made the experience of being a woman a central issue in her poetry, and
though she endured criticism for bringing subjects such as menstruation,
abortion and drug addiction into her poems, her skill as a poet
transcended the controversies over her subject matter.
[[insert “Her
Kind” ]]
CARL:
Audre Lorde was a black woman, a
mother, a daughter, a Lesbian, a feminist, and an activist. Her poetry, as well as her essays and novels, reflected all
of her experiences in life and left her open to a great deal of
criticism. In an interview
in the journal Callaloo, Lorde responded to her critics:
quote, My sexuality is part and parcel of who I am, and my poetry
comes from the intersection of me and my worlds … Jesse Helms’s
objection to my work is not about obscenity…or even about sex.
It is about revolution and change…aimed at his destruction, and
the destruction of every single thing he stands for, close quote.
[[insert
“A
Song for Many Movements”]]
PATTIE:
Joy Harjo is a Native American
poet who performs her poetry and plays saxophone with her band, Poetic
Justice. She is also a filmmaker and scriptwriter.
She is active in promoting Native arts and educating young people
about poetry and Native culture.
[[insert “A
Postcolonial Tale”]]
CARL:
Catherine Anderson is the author
of a collection of poems entitled In the Mother Tongue.
She lives and works in Boston’s immigrant communities.
Her work lies at the intersection of sexism, ethnocentricism and
working class values.
[[insert “Womanhood”]]
PATTIE:
Rafael Campo, born in 1964, is
the youngest of the poets who’s work is available in the Academy of
American Poets listening room. His
poems, essays and reviews have appeared in several publications and he
has authored three books of poetry published in the 1990s.
He is also a practicing physician at Harvard Medical School and
the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
[[insert “The
Distant Moon”]]
copyright
by Pattie Thomas and Carl Wilkerson 2002
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