Renaissance: Editor’s Discussion, August 2022

Dear Reader,

The Boston Globe recently published an article featuring poet Tracy K. Smith that asked if poetry can possibly matter “at a time like this.” The ages-old question of poetry and utility always grabs me. I believe that language matters because how we speak to each other, what we call each other, and how we interact with each other makes up our day-to-day existence. Poetry, as a language construct that changes how we relate to one another and to the world around us, matters in the way that language matters. However, I think it is the context that poetry comes with that people question more than this mode of expression. When the Globe refers to “poetry,” their reference inescapably involves the trappings and the “business” of poetry; interviewing former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith to answer this question proves that the business itself and the system of accolades around writing are part of the question. Does poetry, in the way that we have come to understand it because of how it is distributed, matter?

The Globe article claims that American poetry has recently had a renaissance. I don’t want to argue the relative importance of today’s versus yesterday’s poets; however, the word “renaissance” in this instance assumes a death-before-rebirth, a decline in poetry before a new, meteoric rise represented by poet-celebrities like Rupi Kaur and Amanda Gorman一whom the article references alongside Smith. Kaur and Gorman are very capable of delivering poetry of the moment on Instagram or on a stage, and this gives them immense power in the public-facing arts scene. As I read it, the word renaissance assumes that the work being done quietly (in books, perhaps, and in classrooms) is not the work of an important, living art form. Is this what the article means by poetry that matters, and do we, readers and writers, agree?

We need to consider how poetry is delivered, by whom, and for whom. Poetry in print can assume a quiet death-like existence; sometimes the book as an object is fated to relative obscurity in terms of public-facing power while it works considerable magic in the readers who are drawn to it. Other poetries not primarily of the page that thrive off sound, body, and presence perform and declare their importance in the now. Slam, for instance, is arguably most viscerally gripping in the immediate exchange of energy from performer to viewer. Slam’s immediacy, lending this form to content of “the moment” of a time like this, can be seen as power just as the quiet changes wrought in the reader’s mind by the book on the shelf are power. Instapoetry also has an immediacy and a speed the likes of which other poetry contracted for publication years in advance cannot come close to. Smith, a poet we may think of as a “book poet,” and performers like Gorman and Insta-poets like Kaur (who also have books) are exploring different facets of the essential power of poetry as a language and “high energy construct,” to borrow from Charles Olson.

Often, it is really the poet and not the poetry that is responsive to the moment. We can speak of “American poetry’s moment” all we want, but that does not make Poetry an active subject. Poetry is a mode or action of language. It takes a person to make a poem (A.I. aside), and that person decides to make their poem responsive by placing it in the appropriate arena, to the extent that the poet controls the poem in the world. As in the case of Maggie Smith’s poem “Good Bones,” one perennial example of a viral poem, it also takes an audience to label a poem “of the moment” and spread it like wildfire across the internet. Poetry can be many things and should be none. As an art form, it becomes what you, the writer or reader, want it to be; interpretation is a key example of this. However, poetry does matter in the sense that where the poem enters the world can dictate the extent of its relative importance to that world.

August is the month of the Sealey Challenge, a marathon in which readers set a goal of reading one book of poetry per day for the month. I encourage you to do this– to set a goal of reading more poetry this month, if not a book a day. Read something new and expand the potential of poetry in your own mind. Read a poem to someone else (maybe the Poem of the Day) and share your excitement. Figure out, for yourself, what makes poetry matter in your corner of the world.

Power to Poetry,

Robert Eric Shoemaker, PhD

Digital Archive Editor