We the People Are a Nation of, Gasp, Poetry Lovers

Robert Pinsky took a bet you wouldn’t have thought he’d win. He bet that poetry is still alive in this great nation of ours. He bet that people still read poetry the way they read the sports pages--you know, for pleasure.

Maybe he imagined it would be his grand finale before he steps down in May from an unprecedented three consecutive years as America’s poet laureate. As in: See? This job matters because poetry still matters.

Poet laureate is sort of like being Miss America. There’s lots of inside gossip and praise when the person is crowned, but it’s not long before the tiara-ed one is reduced to opening supermarkets in Muskogee.

Except, in Pinsky’s case, the travels served a greater purpose. Two years ago, he asked Americans to submit their favorite poems to his office at Boston University. He began giving readings nationwide to drum up support for the “Favorite Poem Project.” The premise, of course, was that Americans had favorite poems.

“I was not so sure whether it would work out or not,” Pinsky says.

But it did. There were so many contributions, they went into a book, released in November, and a film, shown last week at the Library of Congress as part of its bicentennial celebration. In the film, 12 people speak their most beloved verse, most from memory. These are, you understand, 12 out of 18,000 people who wrote in. And only one is an academic. There’s also a nun, a glass blower and a Cambodian refugee. A construction worker reads Whitman.

The construction worker, by the way, forms the first and best vignette. John Doherty installs gas lines in Braintree, Mass. When he reads “Song of Myself,” he’s wearing an orange-mesh construction vest and a turtleneck emblazoned with a steelmakers union number, and he’s leaning against a Caterpillar.

He says something early on that probably speaks to a lot of people: “Poetry was definitely intimidating initially. It just looked like a lot of words that were all out of order and out of place.” But “once you come to understand it, you’ve achieved something.”

There’s something extraordinarily accessible about this film, of watching people read poems aloud. There’s the potency of the personal connection, the benefits of inflection, facial expression and the like. A good reader decrypts a poem. He gets it, and he explains it with his voice.

“You’re witnessing somebody experience a work of art in that person’s own voice,” Pinsky says. To illustrate, he recites “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden in a low and sonorous voice; he doesn’t so much speak the poem as propel it with his voice box and his lungs, like he’s the engine to a train following an inevitable course:

Sundays too my father got up

early

and put his clothes on in the

blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that

ached

from labor in the weekday weather

made

banked fires blaze. No one ever

thanked him . . .

Lovers of poetry know a poem’s visceral appeal is as important as its technical correctness, the way that some sculptures are ugly and others draw you in, long before you interpret them.

“As with most things in life,” Pinsky says, “a physical encounter is primary.”

Once the encounter takes place, the personal connection can be rock solid. Student John Ulrich, 20, says in the film that three years back, several of his friends and neighbors died--suicides or overdoses. It felt, he says, as if he were in a cluster of death. Around that time, he read a poem in class called “We Real Cool,” by Gwendolyn Brooks, a poet who hit her stride in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Standing on a rooftop, Ulrich recites it from memory in his thick South Boston accent:

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

“It just made sense to me,” Ulrich says. “How things started out so innocent and got so drastic so quick. . . . A lot of kids I went to high school with aren’t alive anymore.”

Poetry is immediate, despite the separation of years and lifestyles between poet and reader, giving unabashed access to feeling and idea. Seph Rodney, a photographer from Long Beach, says the poem he loves, “Nick and the Candlestick,” was written by someone far different from him: Sylvia Plath, a somewhat privileged white New Englander. Rodney is an immigrant from Jamaica.

“You could hardly pick two people in the world more distant,” he says. “She spoke to me. She spoke to me. She spoke, it seems, directly to my life.”

The film will become part of the library’s archives.

“I think it’s a capsule against cynicism,” project director Maggie Dietz says of the film. As in: “Americans don’t like poetry. Oh, yeah?”

“Poetry in America: Favorite Poems” will become part of the Library of Congress archives. Results of the project can be seen at https://www.favoritepoem.org. The anthology “Americans’ Favorite Poems” was published by W.W. Norton.