Tag: Poetry

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: H.D.

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Selection from HELEN IN EGYPT

by H.D.


Did her eyes slant in the old way?
was she Greek or Egyptian?
had some Phoenician sailor wrought her?

was she oak-wood or cedar?
had she been cut from an awkward block
of ship-wood at the ship-builders,

and afterwards riveted there,
or had the prow itself been shaped
to her mermaid body,

curved to her mermaid hair?
was there a dash of paint
in the beginning, in the garment-fold,

did the blue afterwards wear away?
did they re-touch her arms, her shoulders?
did anyone touch her ever?

Had she other zealot and lover,
or did he alone worship her?
did she wear a girdle of sea-weed

or a painted crown? how often
did her high breasts meet the spray,
how often dive down?

© 1961 by Norman Homes Pearson.

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886 – 1961) was born in Bethlehem Pennsylvania and was a friend and contemporary of Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams. She was a leader of the Imagist movement in poetry, though her work was neglected during her lifetime due to its feminist principles that were ahead of their time. H.D. had a deep interest in classical Greek literature, and her poetry often borrowed from Greek mythology and classical poets, as this particular excerpt exemplifies. In her personal life H.D. had a fluid sexuality, being married twice and engaging in a number of lesbian relationships. She was unapologetic about her sexuality, and thus became an icon for both the gay rights and feminist movements during the 1970s and 1980s.

Editor’s Note: H.D. has always been a fascinating figure to me. She held her own in a boys club comprised of heavyweights like Pound and William Carlos Williams. I have been told that her abbreviated name was used in order to keep readers from knowing that she was a female, in order to expand her potential readership in a time when her ideas might have been more easily accepted coming from a man. Or perhaps it was an homage to her sexual ambiguity? H.D.’s poems were certainly ahead of their time and have managed to remain timeless so that while she may have been underrated during her lifetime, she thrives as a celebrated poet today.

Want to read more by and about H.D.?
Poets.org
Shot Through With Brightness: The Poems of H.D.
Imagists.org

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: SOLOMON IBN GABIROL

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I’M PRINCE TO THE POEM

by Solomon Ibn Gabirol


I’m prince to the poem my slave,
I’m harp to the court musicians,
my song is a turban for viziers’ heads,
a crown for kings in their kingdoms:

and here I’ve lived just sixteen years,
and my heart is like eighty within them.

© Translation: 2001, Princeton University Press.

Solomon Ibn Gabirol (approx. 1021 – approx. 1058), one of the greatest liturgical poets of the Middle Ages, was a Hebrew poet whose entire life was spent in Spain. He was born in Málaga in Andalusia in the third decade of the 11th century and died approximately thirty years later in Valencia. (Annotated biography of Solomon Ibn Gabirol courtesy of Israel – Poetry International Web.)

Editor’s Note: As I move toward graduate school I am contemplating what specific areas of poetry interest me and what I might want to spend the duration of my PhD program working on. As an Israeli-American poet whose parents were founding members of Shalom Acshav, a prominent peace movement in Israel in the 1970’s and 1980’s, I feel drawn toward middle eastern poetry, and particularly poetry that contemplates Israeli-Palestinian peace struggles. Poets have been political activists and anti-war protesters for nearly as long as poetry has existed as an art form. Poets throughout history have played an important role in peace struggles, as well they should given their ability to manipulate language and be heard. As I embark on this journey into this particular subset of poetry you will see more posts that explore middle eastern poets, and particularly those who contemplate politics and peace.

Want to read more by and about Solomon Ibn Gabirol?
Article by Yehuda Ratzaby
Jewish Encyclopedia
SOLOMON IBN GABIROL: AN ANDALUSIAN ALPHABET
Poetry Chaikhana

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: DORIANNE LAUX

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DUST

by Dorianne Laux


Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks.
Now, I remember only the flavor–
not like food, sweet or sharp.
More like a fine powder, like dust.
And I wasn’t elated or frightened,
but simply rapt, aware.
That’s how it is sometimes–
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you’re just too tired to open it.

Dorianne Laux began writing poetry in earnest when she moved to Berkeley, California. Among her awards are a Pushcart Prize, a Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. With a number of books to her credit, Laux is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon.

Editor’s Note: Dorianne Laux has been featured on As It Ought To Be before, but a good poet should be celebrated, and often. Some poems simply ring true to you in both their language and their message. I find this phenomenon occurring with acute regularity when I read through a book of Dorianne Laux’s poetry. I couldn’t get twenty pages into What We Carry without being strongly torn between two poems to feature on today’s series. The poem that competed with “Dust” is “Aphasia.” Read it here.

Want to read more by and about Dorianne Laux?
Poets.org
Web Del Sol
How a Poem Happens

Carrying a Backpack of Sorrow….Soldiers on the Edge of Suicide

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Jack Hirschman, 2006 Poet Laureate of San Francisco, with Iraq War vet, Jon Michael Turner

By Nadya Williams

More of our young soldiers are now killing themselves than are being killed in our wars in the Middle East. The sad statistics are at the end of this article, but the following poem by a 24-year-old former Marine, who slashed his wrists twice after four years of duty and two tours of combat, tells it all.

You fell off the seat as the handlebars turned

sharp left, throwing your body onto

the hot coals of Ramadi pavement,

intertwining your legs within your bicycle.

Lifeless eyes looking to the sky,

your neck muscles twitched turning your head

directly towards us. Nothing escaped your

lips except for the blood in the left corner

of your mouth that briefly moistened them

until the sand and dust dried them out.

The blood trail went behind the stone wall

where your body was placed, weighed down

by your blue bicycle and we laughed.

I used to fall asleep to the pictures and now

I can’t even bear to get a glimpse.

Excerpted from “The Bicycle” by Jon Michael Turner

The military “broke me down into a not-good person, wearing a huge mask,” Turner told the audience at his poetry reading in San Francisco’s Beat Museum, in North Beach. The March 12 event – on the birthday of ‘Beatnik’ literary icon Jack Kerouac – was organized by the venerable Jack Hirschman, San Francisco’s 2006 Poet Laureate, and by the local IVAW (Iraq Veterans Against the War). Jon read from his small, self-published book “Eat the Apple” and from several large pages of dark green hand-made paper – the product of The Combat Paper Book Project, where 125 vets, ranging from World War II through Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, shredded their uniforms to make books for their poetry.  “Poetry saved my life,” he said more than once.

The Burlington, Vermont native was accompanied by his father and step-mother on a coast to coast series of readings from the little book whose name comes from a play on the word “core.” The flyer for the evening reading stated:

“There’s a term ‘Once a Marine, always a Marine,’” Turner says, ripping his medals off and flinging them to the ground. As the room explodes in applause he adds, “But there’s also the expression:

‘Eat the apple, f*ck the corps.

I don’t work for you no more!’”

Jon walks with a cane and was physically injured in battle, but only his poetry reveals his invisible wounds, as in these excerpts from “A Night in the Mind of Me – part 1”

The train hits you head on when you hear of another

friend whose life was just taken.

Pulling his cold lifeless body from the cooler,

unzipping the bag and seeing his forehead,

caved in like a cereal bowl from the sniper’s bullet

that touched his brain.

His skin was pale and cold.

It becomes difficult to sleep even after being

physically drained from patrols, post,

overwatches and carrying five hundred

sandbags up eighty feet of stairs after

each post cycle.

The psychiatrists still wonder why we

drink so heavy when we get home.

We need something to take us away

from the gunfire, explosions,

sand, nightmares and screams……….

I still can’t cry.

The tears build up but no weight is shed.

Anger kicks in and something else

becomes broken.

A cabinet

An empty bottle of liquor

A heart

A soul.

People still look away as we submit ourselves

to drugs and alcohol to suppress these

feelings of loneliness and sadness,

leading to self mutilation and

self destruction on the gift of a human body.

The ditch that we dug starts to cave in.


And from “A Night in the Mind of Me part 2:”

Laughter pours out from the house as if nothing

were the matter, when outside in a chair, underneath

a tree, next to the chickens, I sit,

engulfed in my own sorrows………

Resting on the ground is my glass,

half filled with water but I don’t have

enough courage to pick it up and smash it against

my skull so that everyone can watch blood

pool in the pockets where my collar

bones meet my dead weighted shoulders,…

Every time I’m up, something pulls me down,

whenever I relax, something stresses me out,

every time a smile tugs on my heart, an

iron fist crushes it, and I sit outside in a chair,

underneath a tree, next to the chickens,

away from the ones that I love so

that my disease won’t infect them.

Sorrow and self-pity should be detained,

thrown into an empty bottle and given to the

ocean so that the waves can wash away the pain.

One wonders why this slightly-built, sensitive young man joined the Marines in 2004 at the age of 18 (he was sent first to Haiti at the time of the US-backed February coup that ousted the populist and democratic President Jean-Bertrand Aristide). Jon explained that he came from a military family whose participation in every American conflict stretches back to the Revolutionary War. His father is clearly too young to have gone to Vietnam, but could have easily been in one or both of the Bushes’ wars. Jon’s big brother is also a soldier, ironically now in Haiti after the earthquake. Of the American military, Jon now writes in ”What May Come”:

tap, tap

That’s the sound of the man at your door,

I’m sorry but you won’t see your son alive anymore,

my name is Uncle Sam and I made your boy a whore.

And, from “Just Thoughts”

…………I often wonder

if this will be the rest of my life.

Schizophrenic, paranoid, anxious.

That guy that walks around the city center that

people steer their children away from.

“Mommy, who’s that man walking next

to the crazy guy?”

“Oh that’s just Uncle Sam sweetheart, he takes

the souls from young men so that

they have trouble sleeping at night”

“It takes the Courage and Strength of a Warrior to ask for Help” – we’ve all seen the ads, on billboards and busses, with the silhouette of a down-cast soldier against a back drop of the stars and stripes, and a 1-800 Help Line just for vets, provided by the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. But “The Surge” in self-inflicted deaths continues, with 350 suicides of active duty personnel in 2009, compared to 340 combat deaths in Afghanistan, and 160 in Iraq during the same year – the highest active duty military suicide numbers since records began to be kept in 1980. And for every death, at least five serving personnel are hospitalized for attempting to take their life, according to the military’s own studies.

But these statistics do not include the far larger number of post-active duty veterans who kill themselves after discharge, or, like Jon Michael Turner, who make the attempt. A CBS study put the suicide rate among male veterans aged 20 to 24 at four times the national average. According to CNN, total combat deaths since 2001 (8+ years) in Afghanistan are now 1,016; since 2003 (7 years) in Iraq 4,390 – totaling 5,406 as of March 21, 2010. However the Veteran’s Administration estimates that 6,400 veterans take their own lives each year – an ever growing proportion of them from the recent Mid-East wars – with this figure widely disputed as being way too low. Multiply 6,400 by seven or eight years to compare the numbers of our young soldiers that are now killing themselves, to those being killed in our wars and occupations.

________

To buy “Eat the Apple,” contact Jon M. Turner, Seven Star Press, 4 Howard Street Suite 12, Burlington, VT 05401; E-mail: JT@greendoorstudio.net See also: www.IVAW.org (Iraq Veterans Against the War)

Nadya Williams is a free-lance journalist and a former study-tour coordinator for Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based human rights and peace non-profit.  She is an active associate member of Veterans for Peace, San Francisco chapter, and is on the national board of the New York-based Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: WALT WHITMAN

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SELECTION FROM THE PREFACE OF “LEAVES OF GRASS”

by Walt Whitman


This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was an American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist. He was a part of the transition between Transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse. His work was very controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality. (Annotated biography of Walt Whitman courtesy of Wikipedia.org.)

Editor’s Note: I was sent this excerpt from Leaves of Grass by two different people this past week, which to me was a sign that it needed to be shared with you. Walt Whitman is that rare example of a poet who is well known by name today. Recently Andrew Sullivan featured this same excerpt in The Atlantic. As previously featured in this series, Levis has made Walt Whitman the voice of their Freedom campaign. In his own time Whitman was controversial. Today his words are less so in comparison to what is the norm in the modern world. And still, Whitman is known, quoted, referenced, revered, and loved. My own introduction to Whitman was through the poets I am closest to. Ginsberg, Lorca, Spicer – to the poets who came after him, Whitman was a hero and mentor. Because of Whitman, not only was Whitman’s own timeless poetry written, but great poetry was written by those who followed.

Want to read more by and about Walt Whitman?
The Walt Whitman Archive
Poets.org
WaltWhitman.org

Book Review of David R. Slavitt’s Re Verse

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Re Verse: Essays on Poetry and Poets
David R. Slavitt
Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0-8101-2084-4


David Slavitt´s Re Verse: Essays on Poetry and Poets is at once a meditation on his long and varied career, an investigation into the nature of poetry, and an homage to some of America´s finest (if not always most celebrated) poets. Slavitt has studied with or been friends with many of the biggest names in writing and publishing in the second half of the twentieth century, and for that intimate vantage point alone, this collection of essays is a must-have for every academic library, every scholar and student of American literature, and every would-be poet.

Re Verse immediately strikes the reader as well suited as a supporting text to a poetry workshop. In the reworking (with present-day, memoir-like commentary) of his Master´s Essay on Dudley Fitts (the original essay having been written for his MA at Columbia), Slavitt shows a profound understanding of how poetry works and how we learn to become poets. Slavitt writes: “You learn to write defensively, as you learn to drive defensively, always looking out for sudden wacky things those with whom you share the road are likely to do. But there is a limit beyond which caution becomes anxiety so that you can´t even get into the car.” How true. But this essay offers more than just wise, quotable catch phrases. It, and the collection as a whole, “gives the reader the tools with which to construct a canon out of the labor of thought and reading,” as Mark Rudman´s blurb on the book´s jacket claims.

Its usefulness is therefore not limited to the workshop environment, but would also serve well as a warmer companion text in advanced and intermediate American Literature courses. Daniel Mark Epstein writes of Re Verse: “David Slavitt has known some of the finest poets and teachers of the twentieth century and writes about them with delightful humor and enthusiasm. His tone is a unique blend of fireside storytelling, literary analysis, and heartfelt reflection.” In place of a jargon-laden text destined to make students who once loved literature switch their major to pre-law, Re Verse will deepen the understanding and appreciation literature fans bring to the classroom, while at the same time instructing. But Re Verse is more than mere textbook. These are personal essays as much as they are essays on literature.

It would be a lapse not to mention Slavitt´s ponderings on his own career in Re Verse. Slavitt has published some eighty-odd books in his career. He has been included in numerous anthologies (Best American, Norton, et cetera), and he has made millions writing under pseudonyms, while at the same time being respected as one of the premier literary translators. By all respects, he has had an astonishing career. Yet we find references to himself as a “minor” author, or lines such as this one, from his essay on Winfield Townley Scott, occasioned by an article Slavitt read in TLS in which Scott is dismissed as minor: “The word that stuck with me, though, was ‘minor,´ which hurt as much as anything else because it is probably true, and I have been thinking about what that means.”

There is also an undercurrent of investigating what it means to be Jewish that intermittently pops up in Re Verse. It does not define or restrict the essays in any way, but it is there. Offhanded remarks such as the claim that comedy is to the Jewish people what the Blues are to African-Americans, or the notion of the Jew as the sayer of the unspeakable (e.g. Freud speaking candidly of sex in an age that repressed sexuality, or Marx pointing out class struggles when it was uncouth to mention such things in polite company).

Slavitt can be scathing and dismissive, and often the most enjoyable pieces in this collection are ones in which he is saying what no one else will. In his essay on (against?) Harold Bloom, Slavitt aptly points out much of Bloom´s intellectual posturing. The following passage shows Slavitt´s deft, harsh dismissal of Bloom:

“His [Bloom´s] bullying classroom habits are not easy to put aside, however, and addressing us common readers he can be abruptly confrontational. I cannot otherwise explain why he would write: “My late friend Paul de Man liked to analogize the solitude of each literary text and each human death, and analogy I once protested. I had suggested to him that the more ironic trope would be to analogize each human birth to the coming into being of a poem…I did not win that critical argument because I could not persuade him of the larger human analogue; he preferred the dialectical authority of the more Heideggerian irony.’

This is pure Bloomishness, graceless, pretentious, and absurd” (p. 92).

Slavitt goes on to point out that Bloom´s “late friend” was a Nazi collaborator and that Bloom should not have been so concerned with not convincing de Man, but rather concerned that he, “in the intricacy of the engagement, […] neglected to call him a fucking collaborator, slap his face, and then do [his] best to see that he got fired.” Bloom mentions de Man with warm regard, failing to so much as acknowledge the disgrace de Man heaped upon Yale (and humanity), in a typically defiant gesture, “a show of Bloom´s refusal to be intimidated by mere evidence.”

From his heartbreaking, elegiac essay on Thomas McAfee to his friendly essay on Fred Chappell (“Ole Fred”) to his investigations into the nature and uses of depression, or his illuminations on Robert Penn Warren (under whom Slavitt studied at Yale), Re Verse never panders and never obfuscates for the sake of sounding smarter than it is. This collection is the real thing, a rare find, and probably the best book about poetry published in years.


–Okla Elliott


[The above review originally appeared in Pedestal Magazine.]

Sunday Literary Series Presents: Sofia Starnes

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.

ONE BODY

by Sofia Starnes


The earth is our great mother and the stones

Within earth’s body surely are the bones

The oracle intends.

(Metamorphoses: Ovid. Trans. A. D. Melville)


Let us suppose for once,

in our intimate illusion, the metaphor

is true.  The ant, nervate, exhausting, vexes


through flesh-fields, into earth’s

fragrant udders for its milk; the spigot

pours an ocean into pail, the evening


falls on metal ears, light treading

lifelike in this shell.  All flutter, wink

of wings, must snap out of the strong,


peculiar outbreak of a leaf,

a single spit of wind; the odd kiss mating

March to April year to year.


The worm partakes of this;

the gopher frets and burrows under skin

we must call ours: brown, humid, slug-


filled—quelling throbs as crust

of a secluded heart we recognize.

Thus would we soak in one soft tissue


the day’s outpouring of pain,

downfall of pears and peaches at the edge

of half-crazed beds. Thus would we


explain the squeezing, tightening

lungs in chase of air, long-taken, gulped

by others with our breath.


There may have been no other foot-

prints in our trek from quietness to quake,

from nothingness to whimper, bang


or bubble, whisper swelling into roar.

One naked, mute amoeba prior to clear

voice; yeast plugged into a moist


desire and gestured….

Be food, risen as auburn challah to consume—

Be that consuming body tumbling down to seed.



Sofia Starnes is the author of The Soul’s Landscape, selected by Billy Collins as a winner of the Aldrich Poetry Series Prize (Aldrich Museum Press, 2002); A Commerce of Moments (Pavement Saw Press, 2003), Editor’s Prize in the Transcontinental Poetry Award competition and subsequently named Honor Book in the 2004 Virginia Literary Awards; and Corpus Homini: A Poem for Single Flesh (Wings Press, 2008), winner of the Whitebird Chapbook Series Prize. Her next full-length book, Fully Into Ashes, is forthcoming, also by Wings Press.

The earth is our great mother and the stones

Within earth’s body surely are the bones

The oracle intends.

(Metamorphoses: Ovid. Trans. A. D. Melville)

Sunday Poetry Series Presents: Raul Clement

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AFFLICTED
by Raul Clement

Doxycycline, Ciprofloxacin, Ranitidine—
the names remind me
of distant stars whose light
I will never see
or else just what they are,
wishes instead of cures.

The doctor sticks a gloved finger
up my ass with one quick
motion. Not quick enough.
It is cold with jelly,
like the finger of an alien,
an inhabitant of Ranitidine.

No blood in my stool.
Bilurubin normal, no jaundice.
No hypoglycemia, lime tater negative.
Chest X-rays, brain MRIs, EKGs.
Blood pressure good, temperature 96.8,
nothing to worry about.

No AIDS, no syphilis, no clap.

I drink the contrast dye.
It tastes like something I can’t remember,
something from elementary school,
the smell of new blacktop against
my bloody face
and the laughter of Leah German,
or any other girl I hoped
would love me.

I lie still until the machine beeps—
nothing like a tolling bell,
so I do not ask
for whom?—
and then I turn on my side.
Ten more minutes and I’m done,
the nurse says.

All around me, the machine
buzzes and hums like an alien
landing pod.


Raul Clement is a fiction writer, poet, and musician living in Greensboro, NC. His work has appeared in various literary journals. The above poem was originally published in Coe Review and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

Sunday Poetry Series Presents: Andrea Scarpino

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HOVER

by Andrea Scarpino


The research shows that the self can be detached from the body and can live a phantom existence on its own, as in an out-of-body experience, or it can be felt outside of personal space, as in a sense of a presence.

~ Dr. Peter Brugger, quoted in The New York Times


Weeks before you died, you told me you’d been

in the hospital bed when you felt your body rise,

hover near the ceiling lights, heard your name called

again and again. Probably the doctors, I said,

arranged your flowers, get well cards. You shook

your head. You were a scientist, taught me to believe

what could be seen through a microscope lens,

truth in beveled glass. Next day, you seized again.

They’re saying Pasquale, you said as the paramedics

arrived, carried you back to the hospital.

You never spoke your full name, called yourself Pat

instead. I played the scientist, blamed your medication,

seizures, hearing aids. What else could I believe?

Truth like beveled glass: for weeks before you died,

your name was called, your body pulled away.


Andrea Scarpino is the author of the chapbook The Grove Behind (Finishing Line Press). She received an MFA in Creative Writing from The Ohio State University, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is a longtime activist. Her current interests include sijo (an ancient Korean poetic form), elegy, the intersections of art and politics, and the politics of clean water. She currently teaches with the Union Institute and University’s Cohort Ph.D. program in Interdisciplinary Studies and is the West Coast Correspondent for the blog Planet of the Blind. The above poem originally appeared in Prairie Schooner and is included Scarpino’s chapbook, The Grove Behind. It is reprinted here by permission of the author.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: COMMERCIALS?

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Editor’s Note: I will neither say that poetry is a dead nor a dying art. Okay, if you are a dedicated reader of this Saturday Poetry Series, you are able to quote me as saying that today’s is a world in which poetry is nearly as much of a dead language as Latin. Nearly.

There was once a time when poets were revered. Today poets have day jobs. When I read the rich history of poetry in this world, when I hear of the great Ovid, of Shakespeare, of Homer, I wonder what happened? What did Alan Ginsberg do right that the rest of us are doing wrong? How is is that in my life’s fairytale, once upon a time there was a famous poet, and now there is none? Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss aside, save Maya Angelou, what average American reads poetry at all, let alone knows a living, writing poet by name?

What, then, can be done to make poetry viable in the 21st century? What can we learn from other arts that now flourish? Like so much in today’s America, perhaps the answer lies with commercialization.

I make this statement in the wake of Okla Elliot’s profound article, Living in the Dollar-Amount Democracy. The essence of Elliot’s article is that we as consumers can make the world a place we want to live in by speaking in the only language that today’s America understands: money. As consumers, we tell companies that we support or oppose their practices by buying or not buying their products. So if consumerism is our true democracy, if our voices will be heard only in dollars, how does poetry flourish in today’s market?

Levi’s might have an answer for us. With their most recent “Go Forth” campaign, Levi’s is using the poetry of Walt Whitman to sell their product. In its “America” ad, a recording of what some believe to be Whitman’s own voice bellows, reading an excerpt from his poem America, as an artsy black and white film portrays a vision of today’s America. In its “O Pioneers!” ad, a narrator reads an excerpt from Whitman’s poem Pioneers! O Pioneers! (from his famous work, Leaves of Grass), while yet another artsy film shows us images of today’s pioneers – the youth of this country. And while Levi’s jeans are (of course) featured throughout both commercials, in both ads neither the “Go Forth” campaign phrase nor the Levi’s logo are prominently featured until the end, until the art has been given its due spotlight.

I must say, I love poetry getting exposure, in any form. And in both ads I appreciate that the Levis logo flashes only at the end – that the poem is not itself commercialized. I appreciate that art is given its due, that poetry is at the core of this commercial campaign, and that in being used in such a way it is not, in my opinion, being cheapened. At least it is not being cheapened any more than is inherently required for a piece of art to be used to sell a product. And, perhaps most importantly, this campaign is spreading the poetry of Walt Whitman to a whole new generation, a generation which otherwise may never have known him.

I am not saying that the commercialization of poetry is ideal or that in a Utopian society poetry would have to “sell out” to be beloved. I am saying that in a world where money talks, and is often all that can be heard, perhaps we as artists have to adapt and commercialize poetry if we want it to proliferate like any other money-fueled art. Bravo to Levi’s for sharing Walt Whitman with today’s youth. I hope they’re listening.