Who Reads Poetry: 50 Views from Poetry Magazine - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022650476X ISBN 13: 9780226504766

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Who reads poetry? We know that poets do, but what about the rest of us?  When and why do we turn to verse?  Seeking the answer, Poetry magazine since 2005 has published a column called “The View From Here,” which has invited readers “from outside the world of poetry” to describe what has drawn them to poetry. Over the years, the incredibly diverse set of contributors have included philosophers, journalists, musicians, and artists, as well as doctors and soldiers, an iron-worker, an anthropologist, and an economist. This collection brings together fifty compelling pieces, which are in turns surprising, provocative, touching, and funny.
 
In one essay, musician Neko Case calls poetry “a delicate, pretty lady with a candy exoskeleton on the outside of her crepe-paper dress.” In another, anthropologist Helen Fisher turns to poetry while researching the effects of love on the brain, “As other anthropologists have studied fossils, arrowheads, or pot shards to understand human thought, I studied poetry. . . . I wasn’t disappointed: everywhere poets have described the emotional fallout produced by the brain’s eruptions.” Even film critic Roger Ebert memorized the poetry of e. e. cummings, and the rapper Rhymefest attests here to the self-actualizing power of poems: “Words can create worlds, and I’ve discovered that poetry can not only be read but also lived out. My life is a poem.” Music critic Alex Ross tells us that he keeps a paperback of The Palm at the End of the Mind by Wallace Stevens on his desk next to other, more utilitarian books like a German dictionary, a King James Bible, and a Macintosh troubleshooting manual.
 
Who Reads Poetry offers a truly unique and broad selection of perspectives and reflections, proving that poetry can be read by everyone. No matter what you’re seeking, you can find it within the lines of a poem.
 

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Fred Sasaki edits the “View From Here” and is art director for Poetry magazine. He is also the gallery curator for the Poetry Foundation. Don Share became editor of Poetry in 2013. He is co-editor of The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
 

Fred Sasaki edits the 'View From Here' and is art director for Poetry magazine. He is also the gallery curator for the Poetry Foundation. Don Share became editor of Poetry in 2013. He is co-editor of The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
 

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Who Reads Poetry

50 Views from Poetry Magazine

By Fred Sasaki, Don Share

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2017 The Poetry Foundation
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-50476-6

Contents

Don Share Introduction, 
Richard Rapport It Is Nothing like That, 
Hank Willis Thomas Better Speak, 
Lili Taylor Out There, 
Helen Fisher The Madness of the Gods, 
Natalie Y. Moore Love Jones, 
Roger Ebert All My Heart for Speech, 
Archie Rand They Could Croon, 
Leopold Froehlich One-Track Mind, 
Naomi Beckwith The Necessary Fluster, 
Mary Schmich Poetry, Daily, 
Jia Tolentino Knowing Nothing, 
Iain McGilchrist Four Walls, 
Roxane Gay A Place for Poetry, 
Lt. Gen. William James Lennox Jr. Romance and Reality, 
Stephen T. Ziliak Haiku Economics, 
Nalini Nadkarni Green I Love You Green, 
Tracey Johnstone The True Nature, 
Alex Ross The Idea of Order, 
Fernando Perez Para Rumbiar, 
Nicholas Photinos Lucid, Inescapable Rhythms, 
Alfred Molina "Two Loves I Have ...", 
Momus Written in Rock Candy, 
Will Oldham To Hell with Drawers, 
Rhymefest My Life Is a Poem, 
Jolie Holland Loosening the Grip, 
Rob Kenner Word's Worth, 
Neko Case My Flaming Hamster Wheel of Panic about Publicly Discussing Poetry, 
in This Respected Forum, 
Sally Timms Poetry Out Loud, 
Anders Nilsen Poetry Is Useless, 
Lynda Barry Poetry Is a Dumb-Ass Spider, 
Kay Redfield Jamison Wild Unrest, 
Richard Rorty The Fire of Life, 
Matt Fitzgerald Gloriously Undone, 
Jerry Boyle Debris, 
Josh Warn On the Road with Wallace and Wystan, 
Xeni Jardin Everything Moves to Live, 
Amy Frykholm Earthward, 
Daniel Handler Happy, Snappy, Sappy, 
Michaelanne Petrella Like, a Noticeable Amount of Pee, 
Ai Weiwei On Poetry, 
Christopher Hitchens Imperfect Recall, 
Etienne Ndayishimiye Dust and Stones, 
Mariame Kaba Imagining Freedom, 
Aleksandar Hemon Sarajevo Blues, 
Jeffrey Brown Reporting Poetry, 
Rachel Cohen Like Soldiers Marching, 
Pankaj Mishra Rama Stores, 
Omar Kholeif To Speak with Many Tongues at Once, 
Chris Hedges How with This Rage, 
Acknowledgments, 
Contributors, 

CHAPTER 1

IT IS NOTHING LIKE THAT

Though most days are an easy routine, people who spend their lives in operating rooms know that something awful is only one burst blood vessel, one uncontrolled infection, one random biological reversal away from ending a perfectly contented life. Our biochemistry makes sure things work well most of the time. But then, what are the possibilities for any two strands of DNA to become entwined? The lurking of chance that gives one person a ruptured aneurysm at twenty-five while permitting another to develop comfortable habits and drop dead at eighty-nine is what makes the poetics of doctoring.

When chance seized the teacher, football player, poet — and my patient — Richard Blessing, he was a lot like me: early forties, athletic, a reader, in love with his life. And then one day as he forced a graduate student to go to his left on the basketball court, a convulsion dropped Professor Blessing to the hardwood. Boom. A successful, happy life had turned into a sad one. Difficult, painful, short.

After eighteen months of his illness, Dick paid very close attention to words. CT scan, MRI, tumor, biopsy, radiation, and chemo are the vocabulary of the sick; because of his nature, the words circulated around the tumor in Dick's brain and came out as poems. What I said to him rattled around in there too. I was out of town when he suddenly got worse. "Is it now?" he asked. "Maybe," I told him from that other coast. "Probably." When I got back to Seattle two days later he was comatose, rolled up on his side facing a wall, eyes closed. He stayed that way for a week.

Then he woke up and lived another year.

His collection A Closed Book includes a short poem titled "Directions for Dying." This title wasn't rhetorical, of course. I couldn't save him, a man of my own age and habits. Was I useless? Was there no justice? Well, no. Much of biology is chance and cannot be altered or avoided even by the acceptance of some infinite force outside of space and time. Medicine only alters the course of things slightly. Doctors have wonderfully exact therapies to influence some diseases, but not all. We don't treat many cancers very well, or genetic diseases, or age. And treatment, of course, isn't the same as cure. Sometimes the best treatments are nothing but advice and comfort.

While my reading of prose has helped me understand much that I didn't know, poetry is a way to better see the things I might know deep down but cannot (or will not) say. Poems create empathy. The person with the knife in hand requires a better understanding of "maybe" than the training provides. While contemporary people, and perhaps surgeons in particular, tend to believe that they are in charge of their destiny and the fate of others, in truth we are adrift in a universe only partially visible to us, and we insist on guessing about the rest of it. Camus said that physicists were reduced to poetry — and that was before string theory. Denise Levertov called our handle on life in the universe "this great unknowing." In her late poem, "Primary Wonder," she writes about the mystery that there is anything, anything at all — let alone everything.

It is this everything that poetry helps reveal in our operating rooms and clinics. One task of medicine is to predict the direction of chance, to help patients prepare for what will probably happen. But that's so small a part of why people consult doctors. What about what could happen, or should happen, or might not? What about the ambush of the least likely? Isaac Babel wrote that the essence of art is unexpectedness, and it is in these side channels of life where poetry is a better guide than a textbook.

Forty years ago, when I was in medical school, I believed in this work as science. But clinical medicine has become a business of technology, not science. The latter is a way of looking at the universe. The former is method functioning within established statistical rules. And method may be industrialized. It is very difficult to jam into the same mind an industrial worldview and a humanistic one, which is why many medical schools now have formed departments of "humanities in medicine." It really is love and work that define our communal life: medical students and residents must learn that. Young people learning to be doctors require poets. It is poetry that shows them, as Dick Blessing wrote regarding his own approaching death, that

It is not like entering a mirror nor like closing a door
Nor like going to sleep in a hammock of bones.
You may expect what you like. It is nothing like that.

CHAPTER 2

BETTER SPEAK

My first meaningful interaction with poets came as a young adult when my friends and I would frequent open mics at poetry cafés in New York and DC. There are two defining moments. First, my mother, Deborah Willis, invited poet Sekou Sundiata to perform his opus The Circle Unbroken Is a Hard Bop at the Smithsonian. Soon after that my friend Nekisha gave me a mixtape of spoken word that included Nikki Giovanni's "The Way I Feel" and the Watts Prophets' "Rapping Black." I was in awe of the courage and shameless earnestness and vulnerability in their work. I...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022650476X
• ISBN 13: 9780226504766
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 215
• Herausgeber: Sasaki Fred, Share Don
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland