poetry to the people - whatever that means

As if you could "give" it back. But that's what Ted Kooser, the erstwhile American Poet Laureate, is doing with his column, American Life in Poetry. (There's nothing like this in England: look at that title. Is it not the most economically polemical thing you;ve ever seen? It's worth visiting his beautifully-designed website for the masthead alone, which features Kooser looking like an apple doll against the backdrop of an old weathered barn hung with rusted implements, and wearing an excessively well-chosen sweater that looks like part of the wood.)

The column publishes a poem a week, syndicated across the vast newsprint plains of America. Kooser has published lots of good poems, and the debate rages in America (where they do still get much more sentimental about poetry, as about everything else, than people do in Britain) as to whether this populist impulse, this popularising agenda, this (oh my God, I'm not trimming back, am I) is doing poetry real-time harm under the guise of good. Remember the stick poor old Garrison Keillor came in for.

Anyway, Ted Kooser recently devoted the column to a tiny poem by a 2nd-grader from Detroit, Tatiana Ziglar. She's a darling thing, who, when asked by an interviewer what was her favourite thing in Detroit, answered "Mississippi." Her poem is about what a seashell might say to her if it could talk, and it is charming. I guess we're not asking it to be more than that and it is wonderful that she's been published in the column.

Common Janthina

My shell said she likes the king and queen
of the Poetry Palace because they listen to her.
She tells them all the secrets of the ocean.

This column has to take "poetry to the people" to an extreme level - if the phrase carried implications of naivety and an untutored freshness. It has generated masses of sentimental (and some rather puzzled) column inches in the States. I'd hope it might prompt some discussion of what exactly people mean when they say "poetry", and "the people," and "give." What is this ownership of poetry? It's ownership of a particular kind of passport, the key to the kingdom, it's the feeling that this stuff is for you. Some people, of course, have always had that. I was born with the keys sticking out my back pocket. (They're the key to the back door, though; and I cut my foot open on the ripped screen.) Others loiter around the border, peering over the old city walls, but all they can see is old roofs.

Kooser is not the first person to put travel-brochure posters out & fling open the gates, of course.

When I was a teenager I had a book called I Never Saw Another Butterfly - beautiful drawings and poems by children in Terezin. I was nearly still a child, and did a lot of babysitting, and was very taken with the book. And much of it is gorgeous, really.

I was also fascinated by the New York School poet Kenneth Koch's book, Wishes, Lies and Dreams, about his experiences in New York City teaching kids to write poetry. I'm still fascinated by it, as much technically by the exercises themselves as anything else. Some of the poems spoke to me very directly when I was young. I mean under 14 or so. And they are still evocative, as this one:

I am grass as green as can be.
I am a tree on a leaf.
I am in New York on a flying blueberry.
Mud is pretty.
Rain is ugly.
I am on a vine.
I am snow.
I am snow in Spain.
I am rain in Spain.
I am the sun in Spain
I am in Spain
I am Spain

--Marion Mackles, 4th grade

Churlishly, though, I'm going to end this discussion with a poem by a man who was himself "of the people," and didn't need to have poetry given to him, whether "back" or for the first time. People thought he was lazy. He wrote poems on scraps of paper under haystacks when he was supposed to be working. His "mss" were so tatty and badly written out that they were hardly even editable. Literary society, when it took him up, did him no favours at all, but he carried on writing forever. Some of his best work, written in almost non-existent mental health, was never published at all till 100 years after his death.

Emmonsail's Heath in Winter

I love to see the old heath's withered brake
Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling,
While the old heron from the lonely lake
Starts slow and flaps his melancholy wing,
And oddling crow in idle motions swing
On the half rotten ashtree's topmost twig,
Beside whose trunk the gipsy makes his bed.
Up flies the bouncing woodcock from the brig
Where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread,
The fieldfares chatter in the whistling thorn
And for the awe round fields and closen rove,
And coy bumbarrels twenty in a drove
Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain
And hang on little twigs and start again.

--John Clare