Wherefore hath thou absconded with our verse?

For Plato, it watered the passions

If poetry rears its beautiful head anywhere these days, it should be Yale. The University publishes a prestigious literary journal, The Yale Review, and runs an annual contest, the Yale Younger Poets Series, in search of new talent. Its faculty boasts renowned poets such as John Hollander, and its student body has a reputation for being dominated by English majors. Yet these factors seem to be isolated elements that fail to cohere into a vital presence of poetry on campus.

This might be because The Yale Review and the Yale Younger Poets Series are connected to Yale undergraduates by name only. As English professor and renowned poet J.D. McClatchy laments, "I'm sad to say that I don't think The Yale Review is as well known or as often read here on campus as it is everywhere else." He adds that this is "a shame really, because when the magazine was reinvented by Wilbur Cross in 1911, it was the pride of the Yale faculty, its best readers and often its best contributors. On the other hand, The Yale Review's stature in the literary world at large remains formidable."

MATT WIEGLE/YH

Poetry's place in society is certainly not what it once was. Thousands of years ago, one of Plato's reasons for banning poetry from his Republic was that it watered passions that should be starved, threatening to drive the audience into a frenzy. When Paul Fry taught this ancient text in his Literary Critical Tradition class last semester, he realized that Plato's concern might seem puzzling to his students. So he translated it into modern terms and likened poetry to television. Back in the day, it seems, poetry was both instructive and exhilarating, "a cross between Sesame Street and MTV." That a professor invoked television to attempt to make a roomful of English majors understand the power of poetry is telling. More telling still was the effectiveness of the comparison.

Yet poetry is still capable of arousing the passions of some Yale students. Anna Ziegler, BK '01, was one of the winners of the Connecticut Poetry Circuit contest, a state-wide competition. She has won several other awards for her work, and one of her poems will be published soon in the Three Penny Review, a distinguished national journal. At Yale, she has taken poetry classes and written for the Yale Literary Magazine and the Yale Daily News Magazine; she now serves as poetry editor for the latter. It is hard to imagine an undergraduate who would better embody poetry at Yale.

Ziegler believes that "poetry is alive at Yale." She describes herself as "thrilled" with the instruction she has received, especially from McClatchy, and notes that even professors in fields as unpoetic as computer science will sometimes sneak poetry into the curriculum in an attempt to "make sure it's not forgotten, to remind people that poetry isn't just for English majors." When asked about a poetry "scene" at Yale, Ziegler says she thinks there are "pockets of poets. There's the lit-mag clique, and then I think there are a lot of free floaters. It doesn't invite cliquishness, it's not a thriving scene like theater." And while she enjoys poetry readings, she regards them as an opportunity for sharing work, but not as an essential aspect of the genre. "I think of poetry as something to be read on paper. I don't think you can get as much out of hearing it read." For her, a more important part of establishing a poetry "scene" is allowing people to get together, discuss poetry and critique each other's work.

Performing it orally

There are poets, on the other hand, who insist that the spoken word is indispensable for bringing poetry to life. This attitude has given rise to a recent movement, which has probably drawn more attention to poetry than it has garnered in decades. The trend, epitomized by punk icon Henry Rollins, features oral poetry whose delivery—often passionate and shocking—is at least as important as the words themselves.

Bidisha Banerjee, MC '02, falls somewhere between Rollins and Ziegler in her position on the spoken word. She believes that oral poetry is "not essential, but complementary." She explains, "It's two different experiences. Reading it on the page, it's more about the content. Hearing it read aloud, it's more about the sounds, the speaker's personality, how the speaker feels." Poetry readings are for her "an interesting exercise, an elimination of the conventional notion that the whole act of reading is a private thing." When a group of people gets together and an author is face-to-face with the audience, when author and audience are constantly rotating, trading places—there's a magical, reciprocal connection established between them.

When Banerjee was in high school, she and her friends organized poetry readings. When she came to Yale, she expected to find, basically, "more poetry stuff." When Yale failed to meet her expectations, she decided to be proactive about it: she and her friend Jill Ruchala, SM '02, resuscitated the recently defunct Six Feet Under. The previous incarnation of Six Feet Under had featured primarily music, dance, and drum circles, whereas Banerjee and Ruchala were more focused on poetry, but they chose to stick with the same name and location, the Calhoun Cabaret, because "it had name recognition that we as freshmen couldn't aspire to."

Now, Banerjee says, "a Six Feet Under scene has evolved, although that wasn't my intention." Also irrespective of her intentions, it has become more of a venue for bands than for poets. Music is what people come to hear, and it's what they listen to. The music works both for and against the poetry. To the poets' chagrin, it establishes a social atmosphere of talking during performances. At the same time, the bands draw a larger audience for the poetry, because they lure people who wouldn't show up for the poetry alone.

Who killed the poetry star?

Sometimes, everything seems to fall into place. "There are moments when the Cabaret is full and the buttery is full and I'm reading a poem, or someone else is reading, and I realize that everyone's looking at me, or whoever's reading, and they're listening. It's a great moment," Banerjee said. Moments like those attest to the resilience of poetry in a lukewarm climate.

Why then does the band scene seem to have eclipsed the poetry at Six Feet Under? In Banerjee's opinion, "Musicians are more pushy than poets. When they were little, they were like, `I wanna be a rock star.' But poets aren't like, `I wanna be a poetry star.' Which is a shame, because I was like that."

So, in her opinion, it isn't that people aren't writing poetry, it's just that they aren't as interested in reading it aloud. And Banerjee has figures to cite in evidence of this discrepancy. She is also a staff member of the Yale Literary Magazine, which she says received approximately 165 submissions this past semester "compared with, say, 11 people who contacted us about Six Feet Under."

The Literary Magazine does hold a reading every semester, but when they threw a release party a couple of weeks ago, it featured not spoken word but bands. It would seem that the best way to get people to pay attention to poetry is to offer it alongside something flashier and more accessible, like rock music. Or perhaps to take the amalgamation to another level; as Banerjee says, "Hip-hop is the most successful form of spoken poetry."

After all, as some of the authors on Fry's syllabus insist, poetry isn't merely a synonym for verse. Poetry is at once much more elusive and much more pervasive; its spirit can be present, or absent, in the verses of the Yale Review as well as in contemporary hip-hop. When considered in these terms, it's more difficult to assess the health of poetry—but the diagnosis is far more optimistic.

Graphic by Matt Wiegle.

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