Pro Publica
Last Saturday morning I drove with a friend to the East Somerville public library to hear Somerville’s poet laureate, Lloyd Schwartz, lead a session of “Let’s Talk about a Poem.” Fifteen patrons squeezed around a table with handouts of John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and W.B. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium.” Some were poets also. Some had come to last month’s discussion, while others were curious neighbors or drop-ins. Schooled or unschooled, we agreed that if poetry had things to say worth hearing, each of us was also worth hearing as we responded to two literary classics.
Lloyd asked my friend to read the “Ode” aloud, reminding me how luscious Keats feels on the tongue. On a blustery day, many sighed along with Keats for “a beaker full of the warm South.” One patron commented that he’d read that “South” was a particular style of wine — something new to me. I noticed that Keats first compares his feelings to the aftermath of hemlock — a suicide drug — then opium, then drink. How contemporary these escapes sounded in a public library where the staff monitors restrooms for empty bottles and syringes.
When we turned to “Sailing to Byzantium,” Lloyd drew out the different ways two birds — Keats’s fixed in nature, Yeats’s artificial — embody poetry. Discussion of Byzantium’s “drowsy emperor” raised questions from the audience — is poetry meant for an elite? Is it ornament or necessity? Did Yeats think he’d become a counselor or a toy? My friend and I chatted the entire drive home, animated by different views of how Keats understood the word “embalmed,” and by whiffs of Yeats’s sexual jealousy in “That is no country for old men.”
When I’m in Florida I join a similar monthly group, The Poetry Circle. Sponsored by an independent bookstore and managed by a volunteer, the group shares poems on a specific subject each month — November was “Music;” next month, “Home.” The poem can’t be your own, and it needs to be published somewhere, but otherwise the criteria are pretty loose; for “Music,” about half the members brought song lyrics. Each reads the poem they copied, and explains what drew them to it. Others in the circle offer comments. Everyone goes home with a fistful of poetry, and once a year the group chooses a book to read — for 2020 it’s Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic.
Circle members are mostly retirees, but not all. Many write poetry themselves, but not all. Even in November, before snowbirds settle, I counted fourteen readers — no one had brought enough copies to pass, so we looked over shoulders. Wine, fruit and cheese appeared. I browsed the bookstore’s new titles, and bought a few. I’ve made new friends through the Circle, and the existence of groups like this in times like these gives me heart.
I remember what Jane Kenyon wrote in “A Proposal for New Hampshire Writers,” responding to right-wing threats to defund the National Endowment for the Arts in 1992: “Go to your local library and offer to do a reading of your own work, or the work of others, gratis….Experiment with choral reading; include the audience. Offer an evening for children….Read a play with three or four other performers….Stand on your head and recite ‘Uncle William’ — just DO IT.” She likens art to an essential vitamin: “People must have it or they sicken.” Art is for everybody, and as necessary as food.
So what am I doing? I’m going to talk with the director of my local Council on Aging and offer to run a Poetry Circle for town residents. The hardest work involves maintaining an email distribution list — I’m lazy — and there’s little preparation beyond ensuring that everyone is able to copy poems in advance. If the COA is willing to offer a dedicated space once a month, I’m ready to make the public life of poetry a little more accessible. If your local library is starved for programming, especially if you’re far from the Boston/Cambridge spotlight, consider asking a librarian to sponsor a monthly meeting of the poetry-curious. No headstands required.
Joyce Peseroff's fifth book of poems, Know Thyself, was designated a "must read" by the 2016 Massachusetts Book Award. Recent poems and reviews appear or are forthcoming in On the Seawall, Plume, Plume Anthology, and The Massachusetts Review. She directed UMass Boston's MFA Program in its first four years, and currently blogs on writing and literature at joycepeseroff.com