~by Colleen O’Brien
A United States Poet Laureate died last week: Philip Levine, Poet Laureate in 2011 and 2012. He was 87 and had been writing poems since he was 14 — can you imagine that? Seventy-three years of metaphoring and rhyming and finding just the right word. Being a successful poet is often a compulsion — there’s many a poet out there writing and reciting until the minute she heads for the pearly gates.
Levine, a Detroiter, went to work as a teenager in the auto industry during World War II. He was poor but a teacher got him into what was then Wayne University and because of his poetry was accepted at Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He eventually taught in the California university system as an English professor, a literature professor, a poetry professor, sometimes a poet in resident at various colleges across the country. He won a Pulitzer and a two National Book Awards for collections of his poems, many about the working class and the individuals who pushed themselves or were helped up to the middle class. He was lauded for this topic, not touched by many poets except for Walt Whitman many years prior.
I’m not sure how non-poets feel about poets, but for poets, longevity in their heroes is impressive. Many who have been penning poems since childhood are mightily impressed by those who make it to the big time: laureate status; especially someone like Levine, who was not born to the silver spoon or the automatic higher education.
There have been poets laureate in the U.S. since 1937, when philanthropist Archer M. Huntington gave an endowment to Congress for the establishment of the position. This particular son of a robber baron aimed his generosity at raising the national consciousness to appreciate the reading and writing of poetry. I guess he was a little like another Gilded Ager, library builder Andrew Carnegie, who hankered after not just big houses and lots of silverware but the life of the mind.
The Poet Laureate serves for one year, and other than one annual lecture and reading of his or her poetry, is free to pursue personal projects. Huntington’s endowment bankrolls a $35,000 stipend for the chosen. This was an impressive salary in 1937, and, really, it’s not too shabby for 2015, considering what most poets make (which is nothing). Huntington’s hope was to allow the poet laureate to abandon worries about earning a living and devote his or her time entirely to writing poetry. What a lovely dream that is, even if only for a year or two.
Our first honoree, a Philadelphian named Joseph Auslander, served from 1937 through 1941. Of the 51 since then, 11 (about 20 percent) have been women, the first woman being Louise Bogan in 1945. Three poets were chosen again after intervening years: Robert Penn Warren, Stanley and Reed Whittemer.
Iowan Ted Kooser, born in Ames in 1939, was Poet Laureate for two terms — 2004 through 2006. During his tenure, he was able to publish his poetry in newspapers around the country on a weekly basis. (Newspapers have a general bias against publishing poetry, partly from the difficulty of choosing what is good and refusing what isn’t; it’s a tricky business.)
I like Kooser a lot — even heard him read in Perry — as he writes about ordinary things, his mother’s kitchen, for example. And although I revere Maya Angelou, I think past Poet Laureate Billy Collins is my favorite poet right now. A few Greene County poets went to Des Moines last autumn to hear Billy; they were impressed and amused (he is very funny; if we’d had more like him when we first studied poetry in junior high, fewer of us would have grown up afraid of or falling asleep because of poetry).
With Billy’s personal permission, here is one funny poem by him:
Forgetfulness
by Billy Collins
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue
or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
The newest Poet Laureate, Charles Wright, took over last September. When asked “Why does poetry matter?” Wright was stumped.
“I don’t know,” he said.
That’s what we really like in a poet — brevity, clarity, truth.
Well, we like that in our politicians and ministers, too. And our friends. Poets are us, they come in all the forms of humanity — rich and poor, schooled and drop-outs, housewives and doctors, insurance agents and even politicians. A very few get to sit around and write poems all day and all night as the muse hits them; the rest — even the famous and the once and future laureates — work at something and scribble in their spare time. To our great joy.
Rest in peace, Mr. Levine. And thanks for the legacy. We can never have too many poems.
