This is the first of a series of roundtable discussions which will address issues of interest to readers about writing and the arts. The first is an interview between John E. Smelcer, Rosebud's Editor-at-Large and the author of numerous books of poetry, and X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, co-editors of Literature and An Introduction to Poetry, two texts widely used by generations of college and university students. X. J. Kennedy is one of America's most-anthologized poets and a former editor of The Paris Review.

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Rosebud: Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder wrote in Earth House Hold (1968) that of "all the streams of civilized tradition with roots in the paleolithic, poetry is one of the few that can realistically claim an unchanged function and a reverence which will outlast most of the activities that surround us today;" and it was Shelley who in 1821, told us that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." More than 150 years later, from the far south, Octavio Paz reminded us that poetry was still an "operation capable of changing the world." Is this societal role still true of poetry? Is there still a reverance for the craft in America?

DG: Neither Shelley's pronouncement nor Paz's claim is true today unless we define "poets" as all artists. Art in all its forms plays an important role in shaping how we see and make sense of the world. But among the arts, poetry now plays a diminished role, if only for the obvious reason that so few people still read it. Of course, people still need what they would find in poetry, but they now satisfy that hunger mostly with popular music. As for the reverence for the craft, how can the populace have it when most practicing poets don't take their own craft very seriously?

XJK: In my experience, normal American citizens (that is, those who aren't college professors) have been skeptical of poetry's importance ever since at least 1951. That's half a century. It was in that year, in my sailor suit, on liberty from Great Lakes Naval Training Center, I naively expected a Chicago newstand to carry that city's celebrated Poetry magazine. But when I asked for it, the newsdealer looked me up and down and asked, "What's the matter? Don't they give you leave? I interpreted this to mean that he believed anyone who wanted poetry must be out of touch or sexually frustrated.

JS: As an English professor, I'm part of the small aberrant populace (and how strange they are!) Kennedy alludes to. Perhaps blinded by a love of a thing which pays my mortgage and for the clothes on my back, I still see the function of poetry through rose-colored glasses. Throughout history, poets have often been the primary interpreters of laws, values, and religious interdictions, and in some cases the maker of them. To some degree, I believe it is a truth as valid today as in our past. Consider why it is that the Poet Laureate of the United States is engaged to write an official poem on the inauguration of a new President, just as they did in centuries past for Kings and Queens, while no such official national duty exists in any other genre.

Rosebud: Besides being influential editors, you are each well-published poets with many hundreds of published poems to your credit. As mature men, how do you respond to the chuckles and peculiar looks of people when they learn for the first time that you are poets?

DG: If a stranger asks what you do for a living and you answer that you are a poet, it casts a deathly chill on the conversation. He or she probably wonders if you are unemployable in any real job. For the first twenty years that I pursued this "craft and sullen art" I never called myself a poet. It sounded too pretentious. I am very suspicious of the bardic posture adopted by many American poets. I don't trust poetry as a substitute for religion. It is an art designed to delight, instruct, and console-preferably all at the same time.

JS: Almost everyone I encounter is amused that I write or read poetry, and I am frequently challenged to defend the purpose and function of poetry and literature in a disposable society so dedicated to consumerism and earning potential. Even my best friend since I was six years old frequently asks me what good is learning Shakespeare or Keats. "After all," so he says, "look at me, I'm doing just fine and I've never read either." This issue features a poem by Star Trek's Leonard Nimoy. While I selected the poem because of its quality, I wonder how many readers will be surprised that Spock writes poetry? And if they are surprised, why? What should a poet look like? It amazes me too how every other person I meet is either part Cherokee Indian or a closet poet. Hell, even my banker told me just yesterday, in a hushed and secretive voice, that she has a folder full of poems she's written. And yet mainstream America seems to ridicule poets in movies and television. This just doesn't make sense. If people would come out of the closet about their love for poetry, we'd likely learn that it's one of the most common activities in America right up there beside owning a dog or cat.

Rosebud: You've brought up an important point. Isn't it interesting that books about pet care out-sell almost any other genre? Go to any bookstore and you'll see entire rows of books about caring for your dog or cat, while poetry is often given only a few feet of shelf space in a far and dark corner of the store.

XJK: Let's face it: in history, poetry has seldom enjoyed wide popular appeal. Poets from Chaucer to Donne wrote for an audience of courtiers; in later times, such American Victorians as Longfellow earned a pretty penny from poetry and beheld their books squatting on parlor tables, massive blocks of furniture to impress a visiting minister. But Longfellow's sales never approached those of the Nick Carter dime novels.

DG: I have to disagree with Joe [X.J. Kennedy] on a factual point. Poetry did sell well for centuries, even though it was an oral art and therefore at a disadvantage when distributed in books. But book sales matter less than poetry's saliency. Newspapers and magazines once published poetry that was widely read and memorized by millions. The problem we are discussing is mostly a modern issue. Why is poetry not read today by most Americans above the age of six? (From my observations, kids still adore it, probably because they can't read yet and still live in an oral culture.) My guess is that when American poetry stopped being written to be recited and memorized, it lost the mass audience.

JS: Poetry today has become marginalized in western technological civilization. It spends its tenuous existence mostly secluded from mainstream culture. Its place of social consequence has, for the most part, as Dana Gioia suggests, become relegated to children's nursery rhymes, Hallmark cards and popular music.

Rosebud: You say this as though it's demeaning for poetry to survive in these genres. Isn't it a good thing that it survives at all? After all, as Ovid once said, "everything changes." Do you think nursery rhymes and popular music are unfit and degrading media for poetry's proliferation?

JS: I guess I'm just disappointed that these seem to be the only place it survives en force. But, on the other hand, even the purpose of poetry in nursery rhymes confirms its social importance. Perhaps no single aspect of our existence is more significant than our propensity for language. That poetry is often the vehicle by which we learn language, through nursery rhymes, songs, and the like, says much about its survival and humanistic influence. And yet, interestingly, as we mature, we readily cast aside poetry as remnants of our childhood, valueless and without importance, much like the fictional children in Swift's vision of a utopean society where children played with gold and silver, diamonds and emeralds, and other precious jewels, so that upon maturation, they no longer valued such things, thinking them but childish trinkets, thereby vanquishing greed from their society. Perhaps poetry is so valuable and so socially powerful that we have given it to our children so that they too will grow up and discard not riches, but poetry, ignorant of its tremendous capability to excite, inform and transform culture.

Rosebud: That's putting a lot of importance not only on poetry, but on the cultural function of nursery rhymes as well. What do you think, Mr. Kennedy?

XJK: As for the importance of poetry in nursery rhymes, I'm afraid it has greatly shrunken. Go into any school today and ask children to finish a familar (to you) Mother Goose jingle, and you'll be struck by the fact that most kids nowadays haven't had the joy of hearing "Jack be nimble / Jack be quick / Jack jump over the candlestick" read aloud. Such masterworks seem less often part of what they know.

Rosebud: That seems a bit harsh from the co-editor of the newly revised edition of Knock at a Star: A Child's Introduction to Poetry (Little, Brown & Co.). But perhaps that's precisely why you edited the collection-to attract children to the beauty of poetry.

XJK: I can vouch for the fact that the numbers of people who want their children to read poetry are far greater than the number of people who want to read poetry themselves. At least, the schooled, fairly affluent middle-class people regard poetry as a valuable dose of vitamins. My proof of this contention is that poetry for children in book form sells vastly better than do collections of poems for adults.

JS: I agree that poetry books don't sell. Poets have to work hard to peddle their wares. I've always thought that it was backwards that to have a single book of poetry published is the minimal requirement to be considered for a faculty position teaching poetry. Naturally, you need the appropriate degree as well. Think about it, the ninety or one hundred poems in a collection generally first appeared in magazines with circulations ranging from several hundred to tens of thousands (or more). This means that perhaps a million people may have read a poet's work in national magazines, while the average print run of a poetry book is 500 to 1,000. It's just backwards if you ask me. One poem in Rosebud will be read and enjoyed by ten to twenty times more people than if it appeared in a book.

Rosebud: Our interview is almost up, but there's time for perhaps the most important question. What do you think is the future of poetry in America? Aside from whether it's popular or not, will it have any real function in the new century?

XJK: Agonized shrugs about the unpopularity of poetry causes me to shrug-so what's new? Poetry is a playful and musical language, and I suspect we will long have it with us in some form. It would be much more beneficial to our spirits were it to come to us as inspiring and uplifting lyrics, rather than as singing commercials, but for that to happen we will need poets of more commanding power, and a civilization that grants its citizens the leisure and the ability to listen carefully. There is no point in lamenting the fact that poets today no longer enjoy the authority of druid priests, whose rhymed curses caused their enemies to quake with dread. Poets today, have, I suspect, about as much power as they deserve.

DG: My own prediction is that poetry will become more popular in the new century. We already see it happening. Poetry has more coverage on radio and television than it did twenty years ago [Robert Pinsky, Rita Dove, and others each read poems televised nationally as the second hand ticked towards the millennia]. The reason for this rebirth is the rather sad fact that print is losing its leadership as the main medium for information in our society. Poetry is an art that flourished before writing, so it operates easily in the new age when print is merely one of many ways we transmit and preserve information. The recent revival of rhyme, meter, and narrative in poetry is surely a reaffirmation of poetry as primarily a musical and auditory art. Poetry will never regain the central position it had in Homer's time, but it should be able to do better in the new century than it did-to use Joe's date-in 1951.

JS: T. S. Eliot once wrote that poetry is "not the assertion that something is true, but the making of that truth more fully real to us." Perhaps no recent example from mainstream American culture better illustrates poetry's continued reverence in our lives than in a single, line from my friend, the late astronomer and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Carl Sagan, when, in the recent movie, Contact, awed by the grandeur of first witnessing our own spiral galaxy from afar, Jodi Foster (as the enlightened scientist Dr. Arroway) tearfully says, "They should have sent a poet." That Carl Sagan, one of the more informed scientific minds of a generation, saw the need for a poet, not an astrophysicist, to explain to humanity the beauty of the universe, reveals the true power of poetry.

ROSEBUD READERS RESPOND:

ronellis@hughes.net 04/17/08