In 2001, in celebration of National Poetry Month, Robert Siegel (on NPR’s “All Things Considered”) asked the Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz whether poetry was a dying art. “No,” replied Kunitz, “in fact people are more involved with poetry now than I’ve ever seen in my lifetime.”
Back in the 1970s, Kunitz wasn’t so optimistic. People weren’t reading poetry, and after losing several friends and family members at the same time, Kunitz became depressed. He responded to this depression by writing The Layers:
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
Wow. In my opinion, great poets like Kunitz are the true geniuses in this world, magically seeing some sort of realm of possibility that escapes nearly all of the rest of us. If we could but spend a day listening through their ears, seeing through their eyes….Beautiful, elegant, and magical are the words that come to mind.
The other day a friend claimed that what is dying now are “inadequate visions of what it means to be human.” (For example, consumerism, greed, and corruption are inadequate visions of human potential.) If this is true, poetry can only get more popular, because poetry gives us our highest visions. After all, as Sigmund Freud once said, for every new idea he had and no matter where his research led, an artist had already been there ahead of him.