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Poetry helps make sense of the world's craziness

Sunday, February 02, 2003

By Jim Schley

Author of translations, anthologies and criticism as well as six volumes of poetry, including his magisterial "The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems," Robert Pinsky was a particularly energetic U.S. poet laureate.

During that tenure, from 1997 to 2000, he launched a popular multimedia documentary venture, the Favorite Poem Project, which solicited nominations and then readings from many Americans of poems they found meaningful.

Pinsky's new book of essays is drawn from a series of lectures he delivered in 2001 at Princeton's University Center for Human Values. This brief, luminescent volume, published as a handsome little hardcover, poses a question that many readers will recognize as urgent:

What is the ongoing social (that is, more than personal) role of the ancient art of poetry, especially in a democracy?

	"Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry" By Robert Pinsky Princeton University Press ($14.95)

Pinsky argues that Americans suffer from countervailing yearnings -- for autonomy on the one hand (recoiling from the homogeneity of mass society) and unanimity on the other.

Despite our popular culture's emphasis on self-reliance and independence, as a people we often appear drastically anxious to blend into the crowd. As Pinsky observes, while we're pressed to submit and conform, we feel compelled to keep asserting our individuality.

As a result, we suffer from contradictory terrors: dread of either being absorbed into an anonymous conglomerate or of being dispersed in our separate "identities," lacking a sense of kinship with an encompassing community.

This is a state Pinsky sees as: "a vicious, tribalized factionalism, the coming apart of civic fabrics through fragmentation, ranging from the tremendous, paranoid brutalities of ethnic cleansing and ruthless terrorism to the petty division of mass culture into niches. Religious difference, racial difference, linguistic difference, even generational difference can seem compounded and hypertrophied by information-age forces."

Pinsky's rhetorical dueling partner is the early 18th-century French social historian Alexis de Tocqueville, author of "Democracy in America," who after traveling through the country wrote:

"Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests -- in one word, so anti-poetic -- as the life of a man in the United States."

Of Americans' oft-noted lack of historical sensibility, Tocqueville laments, "Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart."

"To be thrown back 'forever' on oneself," Pinsky counters, "suggests a degree of mobility, a freedom from constraint and dependence, that is potentially exhilarating as well as deranging: a liberation, as well as a void."

The most exhilarating sections of Pinsky's new book again display his gifts as a guide to close reading and listening. These are the means -- sound in movement, experienced aloud -- by which the greatest poems rise clear above the ordinary clatter and din.

Pinsky shows how poems make sense of tumultuous, unpredictable, even crazed existence. The enjoined cadences of words and rhythms that make up a poetic voice convey sensations of human contact, fusing individual awareness with another consciousness. He believes that poetry achieves such fusion more completely than any other artistic medium.

In the Favorite Poem Project, that convergence of public and personal, Pinsky and his colleagues demonstrated that many readers -- regular folks -- have intense and enduring relationships with poems. And while clearly seeing heroism in poetry's way of vaulting over the boundaries that divide us, Pinsky distinguishes that role from moral crusading.

"Poetry is not the voice of virtue and right thinking -- not the rhyme department of any progressive movement. The turns of verse, between justified and ragged, the regular and the unique, the spoken and the implied, the private and the social, profoundly embody not a moral but a cultural quest for life between a barren isolation on one side and an enveloping mass on the other. That quest is the action of poetry's voice."

Jim Schley is a poet and publisher based in Vermont.