A DYING ART, RESUSCITATED

Ah April, that glorious month when the weather is erratic and poetry gains a few more hours in the spotlight. National Poetry Month invariably prompts a flurry (or steady trickle) of articles and musings about whether poetry is a dying art form, or even if it has a place in modern society at all.

In Newsweek Marc Bain cited a study by the NEA that found that in 2008 just 8.3% of adults had read any poetry in the preceding year. "That figure was 12.1 percent in 2002, and in 1992, it was 17.1 percent...the number of people reading poetry has decreased by approximately half over the past 16 years."

It sounds bad, sure, but Bain suggests we needn't ring the alarm just yet. Such studies often lean towards Chicken Little alarmism, as "poetry has been supposedly dying now for several generations". He writes:

In 1934, Edmund Wilson published an essay called "Is Verse a Dying Technique?" Fifty-four years later, Joseph Epstein chimed in with "Who Killed Poetry?" and former NEA chairman Gioia gained fame with a 1991 piece titled "Can Poetry Matter?" In answering their titular questions, all three to some degree concluded that poetry's concentration in the hands of specialists and the halls of academia was bad for the art form's health.

Former poet laureate [Donald] Hall, who published an essay called "Death to the Death of Poetry" in 1989, has heard it all before. "I'm 80 years old," he says. "[For] 60 years I've been reading about poetry losing its audience.

The poet Christian Bök is taking more serious measures to ensure his work withstands extinction. Bök (a pseudonym pronounced bahk, his real name is pronounced book) is hard at work on the "Xenotext Experiment", a collaboration with Stuart Kauffman, a geneticist, to inscribe a short section of poetic verse into bacterial DNA and then integrate it into bacterium. As he explained in an interview with Steven Voyce: "I am hoping to 'infect' the language of genetics with the 'poetic vectors'".

It may sound crazy, but Bök is in good company. Pak Chung Wong at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has inscribed and stored the lyrics to "It's a Small World After All" as a plasmid of DNA inside Deinococcus radiodurans, a bacterium resistant to inhospitable environments.

I don't know that Bök would like to describe his work as a vaccine for a dying art. But he perhaps would share the opinion that the "halls of academia" are bad for poetry: he chides poets for knowing "very little of epistemological noteworthiness". His own poems, though not yet bound up in DNA, are distinctive, and excellent. In second book "Eunoia" (the shortest word containing all the vowels, and Greek for "beautiful thinking"), he set himself the task of writing each chapter with a single vowel. I heard him read from it a few years ago, and it was quite extraordinary (also check out his beat-boxing skills).

As he puts it "the language played host to conspiracy"--each vowel produces a certain mood and cadence. Here's an excerpt from "E", about Helen of Troy, as reproduced on the BBC Radio 4 site:

Versemen retell the represented events, the resplendent scenes, where, hellbent, the Greek freemen seek revenge whenever Helen, the new-wed empress, weeps. Restless, she deserts her fleece bed where, detested, her wedded regent sleeps. When she remembers Greece, her seceded demesne, she feels wretched, left here, bereft, her needs never met.

This cheeky experiment, with its double-handed constraints and freedom of metre, rhythm and syntax, he injects life into the art form. The meanings of these poems shift in novel ways. We see this elsewhere, too. Last August Robert Pinsky published a wonderful essay in Slate on Milton. In considering the W.E.B. Du Bois quote "I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not", he suggests its power is partly derived from its blank-verse rhythm and the irreverence of the unfastened "not", moved here to the end of the sentence.

As the month draws to a close, I'm not too worried about the dying art. It appears in myriad ways, from Milton's writings about the Christian Book to the poetry of Christian Bök, and also in between.

~ ARIEL RAMCHANDANI

PIcture Credit: Maria Keays (via Flickr)