A bit of poetic justice

By Bob Greene

Not that it will successfully compete for the public's attention against, say, the soon-to-begin National Basketball Association playoffs, but National Poetry Month is already more than half over, and perhaps it is time to say a few words of praise about it.

National Poetry Month is exactly what it sounds like: a month during which people are encouraged to think about poetry.

You would never need to declare a National Television Month, or a National Movies Month, but poems need all the help they can get, and they are getting some. The Academy of American Poets is very much behind National Poetry Month - which is not quite the same thing as having Congress or the Pentagon or the Coca-Cola Co. behind something, but it's still nice.

Poems and poets need a hand because poetry goes against everything America has taught itself to value. In a land that lusts after the big, poetry is small. In a land that salivates over the loud and the boisterous, poetry - even when it pretends to be brash - is at essence quiet. In a land that rewards those who hit us over the head with the obvious, poetry whispers in our ears and makes us work for our pleasure. Of all the ways anyone has ever thought up to get rich quick, writing poems is nowhere on the list.

When people go into their local bookstores, odds are they won't walk out with a volume of poetry. Books of poems just don't offer the promise of heft and girth the way popular novels and biographies do; a beautifully crafted poem can stay inside the soul longer than any dozen potboiler novels, but when it comes to books of prose against books of poetry, book purchasers behave as if they're buying wheat or soybeans - they want to get the most words for their money.

Which makes you think about why poets do what they do. Oh, we can guess why they do it - because they love it, because it fills them up. Yet in a country in which a two-page movie proposal can bring in a studio contract worth $2 million, poets make the conscious decision to devote their lives to an art form that many people are scared to touch.

Not that all poetry is good; much of it is terrible (Kathryn and Ross Petras have edited a new volume called Very Bad Poetry, which is being sold to the public as "a compendium of the worst verse ever written in English."

Some of the poems are so awful - "Ode on the Mammoth Cheese," "An Elegy to a Dissected Puppy" - that it is difficult to know whether the editors really have collected putrid poems, as they claim, or whether they simply sat down and wrote the worst poems they could. National Poetry Month, one suspects, does not differentiate; a poem is a poem, at least during April, and should be given its moment to shine.

John S. O'Connor, a high school English teacher, is angered by what he considers to be a not-very-nice scheme: A company represents itself to students as publishing an anthology of the best poems of the year - then, according to O'Connor, accepts the students' poems and sells the books to them for $79 a copy.

The wonderful things that happen to people who write poetry are, more often than not, very private wonderful things; there is almost no chance that millions of strangers will read the poem of your average poet, but the act of crafting the poem can and does warm the author long into his or her life.

Occasional great things do happen; Lisel Mueller of Lake County, Ill., won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry last week and, according to news reports, was rewarded by a celebratory martini mixed by her husband. Not a bad combination, when you think of it - a poem, the Pulitzer, and a martini - but even with her new accolade, Lisel Mueller is unlikely to see her work reach the masses. Such is the poet's unwritten contract with life.

Some poets - very bad poets - do reach tens of millions of Americans routinely, but they have a trick. They take their poems - which often don't even try to rhyme - put some electric guitars and drums behind them, and let the money and applause roll in. It's as easy as a song.

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