To kick off National Poetry Month, Poetry Editor Charlie Bondhus writes about poetry’s role in “the unacknowledged world” and invites all readers to consider their own “moments of being.”
If you have taken a course in Romantic Lit, you are probably familiar with Percy Shelley’s (husband to Frankenstein author Mary Shelley) famous—and somewhat pompous—pronouncement that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Less well-known is the poet George Oppen’s revision of Shelley’s famous statement. Oppen transposed one word and thus completely changed the meaning, preferring to take the position that “Poets are the legislators of the unacknowledged world.”
April is National Poetry Month and, if you’re anything like me, your Facebook feed will be filled with exhortations to “write a poem a day” to celebrate what is affectionately termed “NaPoMo” or “NaPoWriMo.” As we sit down to read and write poems though, I feel that it’s useful to think about Shelley and Oppen.
As a poet, my ego is stroked by Shelley’s proclamation. Finally I have some power, even if said power is an “unacknowledged” one. Perhaps that’s even better—the poet as Illuminati, secretly guiding the trajectory of human history from behind the scenes, like a little god, shaping everything, yet accountable to no person or thing.
But let’s step down from the high horse. Who reads poetry anymore? Our words may be powerful (sometimes), but who hears them? Unlike some recent critics, I’m not about to launch into a handwringing screed on “the death of poetry.” Poetry is still read and appreciated. I know plenty of people—some, poets themselves; others, not—who love poetry and have made it an integral part of their lives.
However, it is also true that poetry exists in the United States as a kind of subculture. Often, the people who are into poetry in a given geographical area mostly know each other. Many of them have jobs and family lives that are completely separate from the poetry world. Like having a love for classical music or ice curling, their passion for poetry is seen as a good and admirable thing, but it’s not as “mainstream” as having a love for college basketball or hip-hop or Breaking Bad.
And because poetry is not mainstream, it is hard for me to see Shelley’s statement as an accurate summation of the state of the poet in the 21st century United States. Simply put, poetry is just not a big enough part of our public consciousness to “legislate the world.”
This brings me to Oppen. Perhaps because poetry is generally not on popular culture’s radar, it often stakes out its territory in “the unacknowledged world.” A mother of a baby writes a poem about the midnight feeding. A man who enjoys hiking composes a focused, reflective piece on the way the sun hits the leaves when it’s first coming up. A soon-to-be divorced person writes on the moment she or he was staring at a glass of water and realized that the marriage simply wasn’t going to work.
So much of poetry’s power comes from these instances, what novelist Virginia Woolf called “moments of being,” when “an individual experiences a sense of reality, in contrast to the states of ‘non-being’ that dominate most of an individual’s conscious life, in which they are separated from reality by a protective covering. Moments of being could be a result of instances of shock, discovery or revelation.”
This is not to say that poetry is always and inherently private. Poetry of public moments—whether it be 9/11, the election of our first Black president, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or whatever else—is, in my opinion, at its strongest when it engages an “unacknowledged” piece of that event. What went through hijacker Mohamed Atta’s mind when he steered American Airlines Flight 11 into One World Trade Center? What are the ramifications of Obama’s election for the Black child living in the inner city? What are the experiences of the soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan?
As we enter National Poetry Month 2014, I invite all people to think about the “unacknowledged,” the “moments of being” in their own lives. Think about how these moments enrich you and make you better people. If you’re inclined to write a poem, think about letting the writing flow out of your recollection of such a moment. And when you read poetry, ask yourself, what unacknowledged truth or reality is this poem bringing to light? And how can it perhaps cause you to rethink your own perspective/assumptions?
I wish you all a thoughtful, enjoyable, productive National Poetry Month.
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Great article, Charlie. Thought provoking and definitely worthy of both publication and discussion.
Charlie, thanks for this. When I first met with Tom Matlack, the founder of The Good Men PRoject, he had said that he was collecting stories about the “defining moments of mens lives”. And later in that same meeting he passed me a half-completed manuscript and said, “You can read my story if you want. It’s the stuff guys don’t usually talk about.” We talked about a lot of other things in that meeting but those were two of the things that stuck with me most — that we had a chance to explore the “unacknowledged world of men” in… Read more »
Lisa, thank you so much!
I agree that advertising can be very creative. I’ve never worked in it formally but, as a poet, I’ve had to give myself a few crash courses in Marketing 101. The notion of actually putting POETRY into advertising, or seeing advertising as a kind of poetry, is a new concept to me though.
I suppose advertising strives for some of the same stuff poetry does–a getting under the skin, a speaking to something on the subconscious level–albeit with very different end goals.
Great points, Charlie. And speaking of unacknowledged truths, what do you think of Shelley’s declaration that poetry “redeems from decay the visitations of the divine in man”?
Meg, I see your Percy Shelley, and raise you one Wallace Stevens: “The poet is the priest of the invisible.”
Poetry (good poetry, that is) definitely does what Shelley says it does in this case. I’m very much a believer that only poetry–well OK, maybe music too–can express what is generally thought inexpressible. And “the visitations of the divine in man” is definitely something “inexpressible” by conventional means.