What Is Good Poetry, and When Did It Die? - Uncle Orson Reviews Everything

April has long been designated as "Poetry Month," though I imagine this passes most people by without attracting any more attention than if it were designated Popsicle Month.

This is no surprise: Academic-literary poetry has long since become mostly encrypted and anti-poetic, which is how it's generally taught in the public schools.

Teachers these days don't even try to teach meter and rhyme; usually, if they try to get kids to create poetry at all, they resort to haiku, a poetic form designed for another language, without any particular grace in English; or "slam poetry" that is little more than an unconstructed gush of emotion -- rather as if throwing up were an art form.

For instance, take the book The Best American Poetry 2010, edited by Amy Gerstler. The book is an inadvertent confession that poetry in America, at least in elite circles, has been dead so long that nobody can even identify the body.

Page after page is devoted to "prose poems," which are merely extravagant, narcissistic cascades of words with no music or structure to link them to what the words "poetry" and "verse" actually mean. Or meant, anyway.

Even the poems that can be read by ordinary English-speakers without a decoder ring show little sense of meter or even what a poetic line is for.

I think of this book, not as the tombstone of contemporary poetry, but rather as a cenotaph, because almost nobody in this book seems even to know what poetry was before it died.

I publish a poetry magazine online, called StrongVerse. I recently took over as editor, and I have to say that I've found a number of very strong poets and many others who show great promise.

But of the hundreds of submissions I've read, I find few who understand the craft of versification. The cadences of traditional poetry are rarely present, and as for rhyme -- well, visit http://www.strongverse.org and see for yourself (the magazine is free). The number of poets there who use rhyme is very, very small.

I get plenty of rhyming submissions, but almost all of them are wretched, with line after line that exists only because the last word rhymes with something elsewhere in the "poem." These "poets" think that rhyme is the goal, so that achieving a rhyme is enough; the line is done, they can move on.

The truth is that rhyme is a tool that gives great power to the poet. If it's yoked with insightful ideas, apt diction, and the music of a well-controlled cadence, you can achieve something fine. But rhyme in itself is merely annoying, if that's all you've got.

A few months ago, though, I ran across a poem that rather took my breath away, if only because it was relatively recent -- from the 1940s. It's a sonnet -- one of the most demanding yet versatile of poetic forms -- and it was widely circulated during World War II as a comfort to those who were dealing with grief and loss:

Without forcing you to sit through a long disquisition on poetic form and diction, let me simply point out that this poem consists of naturally flowing language. It is never forced and twisted into jarring syntax in order to fit the meter. It is so masterfully composed that the apt words seem to have fallen into their perfectly ordered places quite naturally.

So why isn't a poem like this one respected today? Why aren't poets in writing programs in universities encouraged to learn the skills that this poet has so completely mastered?

Let me answer the first question: There is zero chance that a poem that simply takes Christian faith for granted, and which has as its purpose the comfort of believers in the face of death and loss, can be treated with anything but disdain in most modern university literature programs. Atheism is such an intolerant religion.

And student poets aren't taught to write like this because (a) it's hard and few can master it, and (b) it's not "experimental" but "traditional," and everyone knows that only "revolutionary" art is worth paying attention to, even if the "revolution" is a century old and all the "revolutionaries" are imitating each other and communicating with nobody and haven't had a new idea in a century.

I can just hear a literature professor sneering at this poem as "greeting card verse." But in doing so, he misses the point completely. This poem, and other works by the same poet, are what greeting card versifiers are imitating, because there was a time (the 1940s and 1950s) when this Texas poet laureate was the bestselling and best-loved poet in America.

I'll be you've never even heard her name: Grace Noll Crowell. Yet you've heard of other poets from the same era who lacked even a fraction of her skill, her compassion, her ability to sustain both a thought and a poetic line at the same time.

It is the "revolutionary poetry" that is quite easy to imitate and, after all the work of decoding it, almost always a disappointment. Grace Noll Crowell seems easy to imitate because her work is so easy to read; but in fact what she brings off in poem after poem is devilishly hard to do, and few poets today even know how to begin to match her.

And when someone sneers at poems like this, I want to demand of them: Why not value poems that speak simply and clearly to a heart in pain? The eloquence of Grace Noll Crowell lives on despite her being almost completely ignored by critics now, and despite her books all being out of print. Google the first line of this poem and see how her work is still circulating among the common people who know the value of a perfect poem, even if it's out of fashion among the elite.

Let me show you another of her "greeting card" poems -- and it is a poem that you might send to a friend, just like a greeting card, only far more powerful than anything Hallmark ever made:

Yes, it is a plain-spoken emotional message, as simple as can be. But so are most of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnets. Crowell's purpose here was not lofty: It was to put a warm feeling of the heart into words that would evoke the same emotion in other people. That is actually a very generous thing to do -- a motive rare among the literati, who seem to think that only negative emotions are worth poeticizing.

Remember, too, that Crowell was writing in a time when Americans were suffering some terrible things together; when we were one people in a way that we don't even pretend to be today. After the Great Depression and World War II, a poem like this one touched a nearly universal chord:

And because you can't find her poems in print, I'll give you another -- one that isn't a greeting card of any kind:

Crowell, who lived from 1877 to 1969, was a near-contemporary of a poet nearly as direct, Robert Frost; I imagine that if Crowell had been a man, she would have been given similar respect -- for both Frost and Crowell did their work in the prefeminist era when women just flat out didn't get taken as seriously in the arts. (Yet the state of Texas did manage to realize what she was, and honor her.)

Born in Inland, Iowa, on Halloween of 1877, Grace Noll got a B.A. at the German-English College in Wilton, Iowa, then married Norman H. Crowell, with whom she had three sons. In 1917 they moved to Wichita Falls, Texas, and then to Dallas, where they lived the rest of their lives.

Her poems were published in major magazines in the U.S. and abroad; she won many awards, including an honorary doctorate; she was called "the most popular writer of verse in America" and "one of the most beloved poets in America" and no one had reason to disagree. People made pilgrimages to meet her; her husband eventually had to quit his day job to manage her career. She published over 35 books, including a final collection in 1977 eight years after her death. And you've probably never heard her name.

During poetry month, let's celebrate poems like these -- poems that are actually talking to real people with real lives, poems that are offered to us as a gift, as a blessing in our lives.

Over the next few weeks, I'll talk about other poets. But since I've found many of Grace Noll Crowell's poetry books, and they are hard indeed to find, I may include a few more of hers. I can never have too much of clarity and beauty and intelligence and compassion in the poems that inform and explain my life. And it won't hurt my feelings at all if we can raise such a clamor that a publisher restores the poems of Grace Noll Crowell to print.

Let me close this column with the words of a hymn by Grace Noll Crowell which, since I first heard it back in the 1980s, has become my favorite -- so moving to me, though, that I can hardly sing it:

Most Christians that I know actually try to live by these words; in fact, I think this is as fair a test of sincerity of Christian belief as you can find. It is Grace Noll Crowell's greatness that she was able to put these tenets into words that so powerfully and memorably stir the heart.

If poets can't -- or won't -- do that, it's hard to imagine what else they can write that even matters.

Every Day Is Special

First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC.

Unions, NATO, and Sleeping In

Thursday, March 31^st -- Play With Fire Day

Bunsen Burner Day marks the 200^th anniversary of the birth of Wilhelm Eberhard von Bunsen, whose flame-on-a-stick instrument provided chemists and chemistry students with a relatively safe means of playing with fire and calling it science.

Cesar Chavez was born on this day in 1927, in Yuma, Arizona. As a labor leader, working to organize migrant farm workers in order to better their vile working conditions, he found that strikes didn't work -- it was too easy to get scab labor to break the strike. So he also called for consumer boycotts of products like grapes and lettuce, which helped persuade farmers to provide for their crop-pickers in order to earn that union label.

History is full of examples of the way individual workers and their families suffer when the free market is allowed to control wages. It's rare when a labor shortage causes a rise in wages, but quite common for owners and managers to discover that they can lower costs and therefore make their products more competitive by paying their workers with bags of dirt -- preferably very small bags of very bad dirt.

Unions, therefore, endeavor to create an artificial scarcity of labor in order to drive wages upward. Without unions, and the government protections that bar owners and managers from unfair or violent responses to organizing and strikes, workers might still be at the mercy of the policies of management.

The problem is that union leaders are insatiable. For instance, there is little chance that teachers' salaries would ever have risen to livable levels if they had not organized. But when teachers' pay and benefits reached parity with the private sector, it was impossible for union leaders to say, "We have achieved all our goals; we will now confine ourselves to vigilantly maintaining present levels." A leader who said that would soon be replaced by one who continued to push for higher pay, fewer work hours, and better benefits.

As every student council candidate knows, you win elections by promising free ice cream. No, wait -- the students are smart enough to know you can't actually get them that. But union members know from experience that, for a while, union leaders can get them ever-increasing pay and benefits. Until their jobs are exported overseas. Or there are massive layoffs.

The system is especially perverse with public employee unions, which use union dues to buy politicians of one party, so that union leaders do their negotiating with government leaders whom they already own.

In effect, the union makes a deal with itself, and hands the bill to the taxpayers. The only surprise is that the union is surprised when taxpayers rebel and elect anti-union governments -- you know, the politicians who have been getting no money from the unions and therefore have nothing to lose from breaking them.

It is also an artifact of closed-shop laws that unions end up with workers who actually hate them, because the union uses their forcibly-collected dues to support political parties that oppose what the workers actually believe in. Teachers unions are the worst, having been completely captured, at a leadership level, by the most extreme Leftists in America.

So many individual teachers hate the causes their union supports that it is doubtful that some unions could win certification if it came to a vote. That's why state public employees' unions are so terrified of laws that would force unions to submit to a plebiscite every couple of years. But what other means do ordinary workers have to stop entrenched Leftist leaders from supporting causes that the workers hate?

I don't want to live in a country without unions -- I'm a member of a union myself, and knowing how Hollywood writers are treated even with a union, I shudder to think of how we'd be treated without one. But I also think union members and union leaders need to be smart enough to recognize when they have won all they can without provoking a backlash.

The sight of public employees making repulsive false charges against the Republican government of Wisconsin made unions few friends and earned the disgust of many. Public employee unions, especially teachers unions, have only themselves -- their excessive greed, their extremist politics, and their rigging of the political system -- to blame.

The Dalai Lama fled Communist Chinese oppression in Tibet in 1959. He was granted political asylum in India. Tibetan Buddhists are but one of the religious groups systematically persecuted by the Chinese government.

The Eiffel Tower, named for its designer, Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, and built for the Paris Exhibition of 1889, was opened to the public 122 years ago today. We Americans pronounce "Eiffel" as if it were a German word; we say "eye-ful." But in French, the name is pronounced "ee-fel." (No, I don't actually think this helpful information will cause a single American to say the name differently.)

Rodgers and Hammerstein's landmark musical Oklahoma!, reputed to be the first musical in which songs, music, characterization and story were integrated into an emotional whole, premiered on this day in 1943. In fact, Showboat had already done all these things; such shows were called "book musicals" because the story was more than just a device for stringing together popular songs.

The difference was that Rodgers and Hammerstein announced that this was what they were doing, which turned Oklahoma! into an artistic revolution that changed audience expectations.

Also, it was the first Broadway musical to record an original cast album -- mostly because the long-playing record, at 33 rpm, was only a novelty in 1943 and did not become really popular until 1948. The real astonishment, though, was that "Surrey with a Fringe on Top" became a hit song outside the musical.

Friday, April 1^st -- National Poetry Month

April Fools Day seems to have begun in France in 1564. April 1st used to be New Year's Day, but the New Year was changed to January 1st that year. People who insisted on celebrating the "old" New Year became known as April fools, and it became common to play jokes and tricks on them.

The general concept of a feast of fools is, however, an ancient one. The Romans had such a day, and medieval monasteries also had days when the abbot or bishop was replaced for a day by a common monk, who would order his superiors to do the most menial or ridiculous tasks.

Unfortunately, April Fools Day in America, instead of being a time for pricking the balloons of ego and authority, has devolved into a day of bullying -- playing cruel pranks on people who have no power to get even with you later. Fortunately, most people ignore April Fools Day entirely.

This is the first day of several officially designated months. This week's "Uncle Orson Reviews Everything" column covers National Poetry Month at some length. But April is also:

National Card and Letter Writing Month: I know, you can text people who live on other continents, or use your cell to phone people in remote parts of America without even paying long distance charges. Why bother with writing on paper and mailing things with stamps?

Here's why: 1. Written letters communicate the unspoken message: This matters more than usual. 2. Written letters can be treasured and reread, saved in attics and discovered by remote descendants or historians. 3. They carry your signature; they feel infinitely more personal and yet more solemn. 4. Their very permanence suggests that the writer is committed to what is written on the paper.

Notice that the title is "card and letter writing month." Thus sending preprinted cards doesn't even count; a printed card, even if the picture is pretty or the sentiment clever, is the mailed equivalent of sending nothing at all.

Christmas cards and birthday cards have an element of perfunctoriness about them -- I approve of sending them, as a way of tagging up with friends and families, but you have not "written a card" unless you actually scrawl, with your own hand, a personal message that could not have been written by anyone else, or even by you to anyone else.

We have received several such letters and cards in recent weeks, and I can tell you, they are far more powerful in their effect than phone calls or emails (though we have appreciated those as well).

National Donate Life Month encourages Americans to consider organ and tissue donation and to sign donor cards when getting a driver's license. Look, once you're dead, if you die in circumstances that leave some of your body parts available for use by others, why in the world would you mind if those parts were harvested and shared? Leave money and memories to your family and friends, but that great beast you've been looking at in the mirror all these years, you're done with that. Let it go and be useful.

National Knuckles Down Month is meant to recognize and revive the American tradition of playing with and collecting marbles. Actually, the thing I hated about playing at marbles when I was a kid was the idea that if you lost, the other guy got to keep either the marble he hit or any marble of his choice. It felt to me like gambling and I refused to play.

Marbles are dangerous in a home with children at the grab-and-swallow stage -- you should treat marbles like poison or guns, if you have children that age.

But marbles can also be quite useful for household tasks like discovering whether a table is actually level.

This is Stress Awareness Month, OK? Got it? Think about stress! Think about what stress is doing to your blood vessels, to your heart, to your digestive system! You've got to realize that right now is the time to get your blood pressure down! To stop worrying at night and get to sleep! To get out and exercise every day! To get organized so you aren't stressed by all that clutter! Stress can kill you!

Why are you clutching your heart? What? You want me to call 911? I warned you what stress would do to you! But no, you had to ignore Stress Awareness Month and live your happy-go-lucky life as if bad things could never happen to you.

Saturday, April 2^nd -- Furniture Market

When we moved to Greensboro 28 years and one month ago, we had never heard of Furniture Market. In fact, we had never heard of High Point, North Carolina -- and, given how High Point is treated by the rest of Guilford County, one might conclude that most people in Greensboro still haven't heard of it.

Here's how we found out about Furniture Market: We owned two really cruddy cars -- a Renault that could not go three hundred miles without needing repair, and a rusted-through Datsun B-210 coupe that always seemed to have room for one person fewer than we needed to carry. So from time to time, when we were going on a trip and needed a reliable car that we could actually fit in comfortably, we rented a Lincoln Town Car at the airport.

Except that every now and then, we'd find that every single car was already rented. We couldn't get a car to save our lives. Why? Because it was Furniture Market in High Point.

We couldn't get into a restaurant above the level of McDonald's. Couldn't find a hotel room for visiting friends. It was as if without any warning at all, the whole of Guilford County was taken over by strangers.

Worse yet, it seemed to happen all the time, like pledge week at public radio and televisions stations: "What, it's happening again? Already? Didn't we just have that last month?"

It was such a relief to find out, after living here for years, that there were two Furniture Markets a year! We weren't crazy -- we really had lived through a Furniture Market only a few months before.

So as long as Furniture Market was going to strip Greensboro of all its amenities twice a year, we thought, Well, we like furniture. Let's go to Furniture Market!

Oh, how naive we were. People like us could never gain entry into Furniture Market. It was like fresh oranges on the trees in Arizona, when I lived there as a kid. Yes, you could see them all around you, but you couldn't actually buy them; they were for out-of-state sales only. Only the culls remained for local sale.

I have friends who make money every year by running this or that concession at Furniture Market, and I have other friends who are actually in the furniture business, so Furniture Market for them is like tax time for accountants.

But for most of us, Furniture Market is two long annoyances a year.

Except ... because of those two weeks a year, Greensboro maintains an enviable level of hotel and restaurant availability the rest of the year. We actually have a handful of restaurants as good as anything in New York and L.A. -- and better than DC or Raleigh -- and all because of the wining and dining of buyers who come to Furniture Market.

So yes, it's annoying to us civilians two weeks a year; and the rest of the year, we get to luxuriate in the things that Furniture Market leaves behind.

Hans Christian Andersen was born on this day in 1805 in Denmark. Unlike the Grimm brothers, who collected fairy tales (or, rather, published fairy tales that the women in their lives collected for them, without getting credit), Anderson actually made up his 150-plus fairy tales. Many of them are now regarded as classics of children's literature. Because of this, Andersen's birthday is observed as International Children's Book Day.

Ponce de Leon was the first European to discover Florida, in 1513. But somebody was bound to run into it eventually -- it's so totally in the way, if you're trying to get from the Bahamas to New Orleans. Juan Ponce de Leon landed at the site of St. Augustine and claimed the land for the King of Spain.

However, to be fair, like most European discoverers, he actually claimed the entire continent all the way down to the center of the Earth and all the way out into space. Ironically, they made these claims despite being devout Christians who supposedly believed that everything belonged to God, who had long since given residency rights to somebody else.

The first U.S. Mint (i.e., coin factory) was established on this day in 1792, at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Later, U.S. Mints also began printing bills of various denominations.

Candies that we call "mints" come from the name of the herbs that give them their flavor. The Greek words minthe and minthos were the oldest source we've found. But the mints the stamp coins and bills are named from the Old English word for money (which in those days always meant coins): mynet.

It's simply a coincidence of language evolution that the two unrelated words converged on the spelling and pronunciation "mint." However, I suspect that the common practice of making mint-flavored candy in coin shapes is the result of that homophony.

Sunday, April 3^rd -- Rip Van Winkle Day

In commemoration of the birthday of New York author Washington Irving on this day in 1783, celebrate Rip Van Winkle Day by ignoring all appointments and obligations and sleeping in. Oddly enough, the world will not end. You might have to apologize to a few people but once a year, it's refreshing to let yourself sleep till you happen to feel like getting up.

English actor Leslie Howard, born in London on this day 1893, is best remembered for playing Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind. His best role was as Henry Higgins in Pygmalion, a movie (and play) now forgotten because of the success of the musical version, My Fair Lady. Howard never had a chance to play many more roles, because during World War II, on a return trip from a government-sponsored tour of Spain, the plane Howard was riding in was shot down by German raiders.

The Pony Express was inaugurated on this day in 1860. The first rider left St. Joseph, Missouri, heading west, and the following day another rider headed east from Sacramento, California. For $5 an ounce, letters were delivered within 10 days, with the slogan: "Pony Express: For when it absolutely, positively has to get there this month."

The Pony Express lasted less than two years, ceasing operation in October 1861, when the overland telegraph was completed.

Monday, April 4^th -- NATO Day

Once upon a time, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, ratified on this day in 1949, stood as a bulwark in defense of the West against the aggressive totalitarian Communists in Europe. Now it is the umbrella under which Europeans get to play soldier while the U.S. and Britain do all the heavy lifting. When NATO troops always follow rules of engagement that keep them from actually doing anything, it's hard to regard them as serious allies.

The Beatles took over the Billboard Magazine music charts on this day in 1964. The Beatles held the top five positions of the Billboard Hot 100 chart: "Can't Buy Me Love" as number one, followed by the Beatles' cover of the Chubby Checker hit "Twist and Shout," then "She Loves You," "I Want to Hold Your Hand," and "Please, Please Me."

Unlike the New York Times when Harry Potter books took over their bestseller list, Billboard did not respond to the Beatles' success by creating a special new chart for "Liverpudlian Moptops" so that the top positions on the Hot 100 could be more "fairly" distributed.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated on this day 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. While some people still try to trade on their association with him, in effect the Civil Rights movement toward racial integration died with him, to be replaced by a new breed of racist political hacks who thrive on stirring up, not overcoming, racial and ethnic differences in America.

Vitamin C, the active agent in the prevention of scurvy, was isolated on this day in 1932 by C.C. King at the University of Pittsburgh.

Tuesday, April 5^th -- Booker T. Day

This is a popular birthday for American film icons: Spencer Tracy (1900), Bette Davis (1908), and Gregory Peck (1916). Among them they had 23 Oscar nominations and won 5 of them.

The Tracey Ullman Show premiered today in 1987, as the new Fox network's first critical hit. Irrepressible British comic Ullman presided over sketches, songs, and satire, while the animated snippets between live segments introduced us to the comedy of Matt Groening, which eventually spun off into The Simpsons, the most popular animated prime-time TV series of all time.

Black educator and leader Booker T. Washington, born a slave on this day in 1856, wrote the book Up From Slavery and was the first leader of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

His quiet and conciliatory (and litigious) method of striving to improve the lot of Blacks in America was much criticized by more-confrontational civil rights groups and leaders, though until the 1950s and 1960s, neither approach accomplished very many gains and suffered great losses in the endless struggle against ruthless Jim Crow.

Wednesday, April 6^th -- North Pole Day

On this day in 1909, Robert E. Peary's expedition reached the North Pole. Peary was the only white European in his group -- the others were his black assistant Matthew A. Henson and four Eskimo guides, Coquesh, Ootah, Eginwah and Seegloo. Henson and two of the Eskimos were actually the first to reach the pole, with Peary arriving 45 minutes later to take the observations that confirmed their location.

They reported that the North Pole was very very cold, but this was useful because if it weren't cold enough to freeze seawater, they couldn't have reached the place on foot, since it's many hundreds of miles from the nearest land.

The first modern Olympic Games began on this day in 1896, when thirteen nations sent 235 white male athletes to Athens, Greece, to compete.

On this day in 1930, Indian activist Mohandas "Mahatma" Gandhi defied British colonial regulations and distilled salt at the seashore after a symbolic, peaceful 241-mile march to the coast. He and many followers were arrested for this crime, generating worldwide publicity.

It is worth remembering (as Gandhi always remembered) that his peaceful protests only worked because the British overlords were bound by rules of civility, and the British press was free to report on his very photogenic activities. Peaceful protest does not work so well when you are killed on the spot and no word of your resistance ever reaches anybody.

Congress approved a declaration of war against Germany and its allies in World War I on this day in 1917. U.S. soldiers didn't start reaching Europe until June, and only reached sufficient numbers to be useful on the battlefield the following year.

This also set a precedent of a President achieving election as the "anti-war" candidate, only to take us into the very war he promised to keep us out of. But Woodrow Wilson, despite much posturing about human rights in other countries, was one of our most racist presidents, effectively ending the federal government's already-feeble efforts to protect the rights (and jobs) of Blacks in the American South.

His hypocrisy knew no bounds, though as a Democrat this did make him a worthy successor to slave-owning and slavery-protecting "anti-slavery" President Thomas Jefferson.