Since this is my last column for the semester, and perhaps my last for the State Press, I felt I should write something as blatantly self-indulgent as possible. After all, when you only make 15 dollars a week, revenge is imminent (insert maniacal laugh here).
My name is Kathleen Heil. I am a big nerd. I love poetry.
Here's where the self-indulgence comes in: I want to spend the next several hundred words telling you to love poetry, too.
When most people think poetry, they think "dead art." After all, you spend your high school years reading poetry about dead guys either dying or trying to convince their female counterparts to gather rosebuds and get naked. Students in English classes are taught to deconstruct a poem for meaning until it bleeds.
Or, as Billy Collins artfully laments in his poem "Introduction to Poetry," schoolteachers want to "tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it."
Poetry seems to be the one art form that doesn't even get its 15 minutes of Pop Art (well, let's all just pretend singer Jewel's "A Night Without Armor" never happened). Despite this fact, poems are still alive and kicking.
And this year's U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins is making efforts to take poetry off of the respirator, out of the moldy books and back into everyday life.
Collins has created a program called Poetry 180, designed to give high school students a new outlook on poems. He hopes to see a 180-degree shift in how students view poems by transforming them from schoolwork into joy.
How does he plan to turn these metaphorical brussel sprouts into ice cream? By selecting 180 poems (one for each day of the traditional school year) to be read aloud in school daily. The caveat is that teachers cannot analyze the poems or assign homework related to them, they can only read the poem and then leave it alone. Collins hopes to help students see the savory beauty of verse, its capability for subtle richness, and the possibilities for immediate gratification.
The chance to enjoy and reclaim poetry as entertainment isn't just for high school students — it's for all of us.
After all, poetry doesn't have to be obtuse to be good. Collins himself is relegated to the sphere of "accessible poets" among poetry academes, but he isn't bothered by the label. In fact, his simple name is an intentional attempt to sound anti-literary. But his poems are far from unintelligent. They are wry, fresh, revelatory and joyfully accessible.
That doesn't mean that poetry is easy to read, though (unless we're talking about teen-age rhyming love poems). But the complexity of poetry is precisely its allure. American culture approaches art in the same way it approaches food: bigger, better, faster, more. In a world where everything is handed to us on an MTV platter with a side order of obviousness, it's nice to digest a something that doesn't come out of the media's "drive-thru window."
Take just a few small minutes a day to discover why I'm babbling on, and see if you haven't changed your mind, too. Three Web sites are excellent resources to rediscovering poetry. Poetry Daily (http://www.poems.com) has a great selection of both established and lesser known contemporary poets, and offers a new poem to read each day. Be sure to check out Collins, Stanely Kunitz, and Barbara
Hamby's work in the archives section. The Academy of American Poets official site (http://www.poets.org) offers select works of many famous 20th Century Poets. And http://www.favoritepoem.org has audio recordings of "Americans saying the poems they love."
As Collins writes (again from the "Introduction to Poetry), "I ask them to take a poem/and hold it up to the light/like a color slide/or press an ear against its hive."
Here's hoping you'll take a moment to indulge my indulgence and hold poetry up to a new light.
Kathleen Heil is a religious studies sophomore. Bid her adieu by e-mailing your favorite poem to ladiekadie@hotmail.com
