Review: Anthony Domestico, Poetry on TV
How to convince people who think they don’t like poetry that there might be something in it for them?
Environmental scientist Serita Frey talks about the microbial structure of mushrooms for a discussion of “Mushrooms” by Sylvia Plath and “Mushrooms, Weakness, and Doubt” by Kay Ryan in Season 4 of Poetry in America. Photo courtesy of Poetry in America
The critic R. P. Blackmur begins a 1935 essay with a memorable claim. We might think that a bit of language is poetry because it rhymes or because the lines break off or because it just sounds lyrical—such an impreciseword. But that’s not right. Blackmur distinguishes poetry “by the animating presence … of a fresh idiom; language so twisted and posed in a form that it not only expresses the matter in hand but adds to the stock of available reality.”
Poetry doesn’t just describe reality; it expands reality. To give an example: John Keats, “whose strenuous tongue / Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine,” gives us access in his poems to new realms of sensuousness. But he also gives us a language for this sensuousness, for how light looks on an autumnal field or how cooled wine tastes as it warms our blood. We carry this “fresh idiom” with us into the future. Because Keats’s tongue is strenuous not just in its tasting but in its speaking, things are different after we’ve read him. New stores of reality are there for us, just waiting to be tapped.
All of this seems obvious to the lover of poetry. But how might we lovers of poetry convince those who don’t even like poetry, who find poetry intimidating or think with Marianne Moore that “there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle”? It’s 2024, so one answer to this question is to make a podcast. And, indeed, there are excellent podcasts out there evangelizing to a general audience on poetry’s behalf: Kamran Javadizadeh’s Close Readings, which gives forensic attention to form and pitch; Abram Van Engen and Joanne Diaz’s Poetry for All, featuring conversations about poems old and new “for those who love poetry and for those who know little about it" (of his general approach, Van Engen has written, “How do you start reading poetry? Encounter it with who you are. Read it personally. Bring yourself to the verses on the page”); and The Slowdown, a daily podcast on which Major Jackson very briefly introduces and then very beautifully reads a single poem.
The problem with podcasts—or, at least, my problem with podcasts—is how often they serve as the background noise to the day: the thing we have on while we’re making dinner or driving to work. This isn’t how poetry, which demands and rewards attention, should be experienced. In “Wheeling,” the poet April Bernard writes, “Don’t tell me / about time. It is all now.” So it is in a strong poem. That’s not to say that poetry is aboutthe now, that it reflects back to us our own interests and concerns. Rather, when we read a strong poem that poem becomes the now in and through which we live. As Les Murray wrote, “poetry is presence.”
One of the best cases I’ve seen made recently for the nowness of poetry is the PBS series Poetry in America.
Produced by Harvard English professor Elisa New, Poetry in America, which just completed its fourth season, has a tight but flexible structure. Each episode considers a poem or two, approaching the work from several different angles in part by bringing together an often surprising combination of guests with whom New chats. To talk about “Those Winter Sundays,” Robert Hayden’s great poem of fatherhood, New circles, documentary-style, between conversations with the poet Elizabeth Alexander and President Joe Biden (“And Dad, you weren’t around, and Dad, the house was a lousy house we lived in, and damn, Dad, in winter it was a bear,” Biden paraphrases at one point), along with several fathers and sons who reflect upon what Hayden calls “love’s austere and lonely offices.” Another episode offers two poems about mushrooms, one by Kay Ryan and the other by Sylvia Plath, with New getting Maria Popova, blogger of Brain Pickings/The Marginalian, to talk about stanza structure, Dr. Serita Frey to talk about microbial structure, and Dr. Andrew Weil to talk about the 1965 film Attack of the Mushroom People.
Behind it all is New, orchestrating her wide cast of characters and gently bringing the episodes back to the poem at hand. Like the best seminar leader, she doesn’t dumb things down but, tacking between technical analysis and wide-angled speculation, encourages us to keep up. The episodes are elegantly produced. They move quickly but not too quickly; the language of the poem is never far away but the show also never forgets that television is primarily a visual medium. When Martín Espada talks about working in a factory producing legal pads, we see such a factory at work. When a poem by Tracy K. Smith describes Texas Hill Country, we’re treated to images of this gorgeous and severe landscape.
Poetry in America’s guests often have some relationship to the subject of the poem under consideration. In exploring Wallace Stevens’s “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” for instance, New talks with Gus Rancatore, the owner of a Cambridge, Massachusetts, ice cream parlor. For a poem by Edward Hirsch about basketball, former NBA stars Shaquille O’Neal, Shane Battier, and Pau Gasol are on camera. These choices might seem gimmicky, but they actually reveal the central thesis of the show: the common reader is as good an interpreter of poetry as we need. If someone is interested in a poem, then they’ll find interesting things in it. We bring our own experiences and expertise to reading, and this distinctive perspective can bring about distinct kinds of illumination. A biologist notices something about a poem’s shape, how parts work to form a whole. A choreographer clocks how Frank O’Hara turns from one tone to another in the middle of a line. A comic senses the proliferating ironies in William Carlos Williams’s non-apology apology, “This Is Just to Say.” Battier observes that Hirsh’s “Fast Break” works because of its closeness to the language of the game he knows so well: a shot “kisses the rim”; a player “scissor[s] past a flat-footed defender”; a guard “commits to the wrong man” and opens up the lane for a layup.
Poetry in America succeeds because it doesn’t so much preach as demonstrate poetry’s living presence. It shows people, specialists and non-specialists alike, excitedly noticing things about poems. Beyond that, it shows how this noticing can expand both our sense of poetry and our sense of the many things poetry describes. R. P. Blackmur’s observation that poetry adds to the stock of available reality is deeply democratic. After all, the stock is open to anyone who will take up and read. The challenge, now and always, is to get people actually to take up and read.
Anthony Domestico is an associate professor of literature at Purchase College, SUNY, and the book critic for Commonweal. He is the author of Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period. He has written for Book Post on Yiyun Li, Eleanor Catton, Marilynne Robinson, Sigrid Nunez, and Gary Snyder, among others.
Disclosure! Our editor Ann Kjellberg appeared in an episode of the current season of Poetry in America devoted to Joseph Brodsky, but she did not twist Tony’s arm re this review!
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"The challenge, now and always, is to get people actually to take up and read."
Indeed.
(That rhymed. Did I just make a poem? If you read 'em, do you know 'em?)
Disappointing to read that libraries are culling as a clandestine way of removing controversial books.
Pace everybody, I just don't see why it matters if people read poetry. O'Hara got this question right in 1959.