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.