Huck Gutman, whom you will know in various roles –
professor of English at the
In the past two weeks I have sent four people poems,
with a modest commentary to situate them. To a new acquaintance I met at the
State of the Union speech, I sent two poems by the Irish poet Seamus
Heaney. To a
Though nowadays I live in a world of legislation and
politics, there seems to stop to the poems which suffuse my life: they seem to
seep into my consciousness at all sorts of moments, and sometimes I seem to have
a need to tell people about them.
I realize time and again that I very much miss teaching
poetry. In fact I tell people in
But a year ago I was so down about being unconnected to
teaching that I volunteered to teach, and in fact did teach, an introduction to
poetry course – generously sponsored by the University of Vermont, which
provided academic credits to the students without even a dollar of tuition
changing hands – at Bell Multi-Cultural High School here in Washington. My students were wonderful, I loved
teaching the class – but I was doing what amounted to a third of a full-time
teaching load piggy-backed on to an excessively full time job on Capitol
Hill. It proved sustainable only as
a one-time experience.
The early twentieth-century German poet Rainer Maria
Rilke wrote of himself, in the concluding lines to his “Self-Portrait” which I
feel like stretching to fit my own situation, that his imperfect face still
looked, “as though, from far off, with scattered things,/ a serious true work
were being planned.”
No, I am not planning on writing a great body of poetic
work, as Rilke did.
But a number of times I have thought that with all that
goes on here, swirling around and through my everyday life – legislation being
written, political battles and temporary alliances engaged and resolved, cabinet
members visiting our office, political strategies successful and un-, new
national programs launched at times through the efforts of Bernie and our
staff -- it would make sense to
write (or at least take good notes) about life in Washington. (One of the finest historians at UVM, a
retired expert on Russian history, told me to keep a journal every
day.)
Fat chance.
Though that makes good sense, writing about
Instead, what I think about is poems.
I read them, fitfully to be sure, on the Metro and the
busses. I mention them to my
friends, and sometimes photocopy them for, or send them by email to, those whom
I think will be interested.
On occasion I used to read a poem to my staff colleagues
on the Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee, some 20-30 people. I'd bring them a copy of a poem by
Whitman or Williams or Dickinson, hand it out, and read it. Whew. I think they were, not always
positively, astonished. (Whitman,
in 'Song of Myself': “Do you take it I would astonish?/ Does the daylight
astonish? does the early redstart twittering through the woods?/ Do I astonish
more than they?” Oh, that Whitman:
he nails it almost every time!)
You may now have an inkling of where this is
heading. I have decided that I will
send a poem, along with a brief accompanying commentary, each week to a list of
people I know, people in Washington (on the Hill, in the administration, folks I
have met. friends) and people in Vermont (at the University of Vermont, in local
politics, neighbors, folks, friends) and people elsewhere (friends and
relations). And to, insofar as I
can locate their addresses, former students.
The first weekly mailing will follow in a few days. I am presuming, by sending this to a
long list, upon your epistolary generosity. I don't mean to fill your mailbox with
spam or 'just delete' content. I've
compiled what will from this point forward work as an opt-out list. If you don't want to get a poem each
week, just send this message back with 'opt out' in the subject line.
Why should we read poems? Not because they are good medicine
(though I suppose they are). (That Whitman! He does itch at one's brain. “I shall be good health to you
nonetheless,/ and filter and fiber your blood,” he wrote in ‘Song of Myself.’)
Surely not because if we read them we can claim to be in
some way smart or special.
Not because poems are 'culture,' since culture is –
always – around us, in one form or another.
Whitman, as so often, got the answer to why we should
read poems exactly right.
He wrote two lines which, to my mind, are the zodiacal 'sign' under which
lyric poetry is written. He bravely
blurts out, in ‘Song of Myself’ immediately after the lines I quoted above about
how he should not be seen as any more “astonishing” than sunlight or a bird or
any other natural phenomenon, “This hour I tell things in confidence,/ I might
not tell everybody, but I will tell you.”
“This hour I tell things in confidence,/ I might not
tell everybody, but I will tell you.”
To which, across a century, William Carlos Williams responded,
affirmatively, about our deep need for those things that poets tell us, in
confidence:
Look
at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Enough already.
The first email about a poem will follow in the next couple of days. Remember, if you don't want to receive
these emails, you can stop them by replying with “opt out” in the subject
line. (If you like what you read, I
guess you forward the email to a friend and tell her or him to put 'opt in” in
the subject line and send that msg to me.
I'll add them to my list.)
Best wishes,
Huck