As everyone knows, W.S. Merwin has been appointed the 17th United States Poet Laureate. His salary will be $35,000 per year. This news, of course, has completely eclipsed coverage of Lindsay Lohan's latest court room appearance, Tiger Woods's divorce settlement and the nation's breathless concern about where LeBron James will play basketball next year.
The Poet Laureate's job is to raise America's poetic consciousness, to get us to read and write more poetry. That's why the appointment has been dominating every media outlet.
Merwin replaces Kay Ryan, who had been Laureate since July 2008. The reaction to Merwin's selection by the Library of Congress appears to be positive. At least there's no evidence yet of the controversy the appointment of Billy Collins sparked in 2001.
When Collins was chosen, members of the University of Buffalo Poetics — a large and influential group dedicated to the discussion of modern poetry — were very upset. To show their displeasure, they decided to establish an "anti-laureate," and chose Anselm Hollo.
While poetry has lost much of its audience over the years, that only seems to have increased the intensity of those involved in it. There were reports that during the Collins protest writers hurled rhymed insults at each other. Some even attacked with dactyls and trochees.
I am not making this up.
PULITZER PRIZE
Apparently, Collins's sin was that he was "The McDonald's of poetry." People who don't know a spondee from a villanelle (there really are such people!) enjoy his poetry and don't know that he is mediocre.
Well, that is clearly unacceptable — a poet read by regular people? How good can a poet really be if non-poets like his poems? Good poets labor in obscurity, writing unnoticed poems that are incomprehensible to most of us but appreciated by other poets. They know if popularity ever arrives, disrespect will soon follow.
Besides, "Billy Collins" doesn't sound like a poet's name. That's the name of a second baseman from a 1950s baseball team or an Irishman the English called a traitor.
W.S. (William Stanley) Merwin at least has a poet's name. And the 83-year-old has a long history of success — receiving the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. When he got that award, he gave the money that accompanied it to the anti-Vietnam War movement. In 2009, he again received the Pulitzer for poetry.
His poems are often free of punctuation, which allows for various readings and personal rhythms. For me, they're much more effective when read aloud, which allows the reader to play with the language, as an actor might, to see what other meanings can be found in the words.
POETRY CHEERLEADER
This is a portion of Merwin's "Listen," a poem that has no punctuation at all:
"with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster"
Is Merwin suggesting it's foolish to say "thank you" while the world falls apart, or wonderful that we say "thank you" during such difficult times? It might depend as much on the reader's mood as the poet's words.
Writing poems for special occasions is part of the Poet Laureate's job, and Merwin can surely do that. But as the new $35,000-a-year chief cheerleader for poetry in America, he has his work cut out for him. If he can get us to read, enjoy and maybe even write poetry in this age of MySpcace/Twitter/texting audio/visual overload, he deserves our thanks. It sure will be newsworthy.
Jerry McGovern, the Press-Republican's coordinator of Newspapers-in-Education, taught in New York state's public schools, and now teaches in the Communication Department of Plattsburgh State. He can be reached at gmcgovern@pressrepublican.com or 565-4126. This column is the opinion of the writer and not necessarily of this newspaper.
