Why a Poet is Against National Poetry Month "As Such"

For a child, poetry is everywhere, any place, language is just another toy. But for those of us who are grownup, National Poetry Month wakes us up again to poets and their poems. That's why National Poetry Month exists.

Now I'm ready to segue to poet Charles Bernstein and his call for an Anti-Poetry Month.

Although you've read Shakespeare and Gwendolyn Brooks, you may be wondering about this Charles Bernstein. So was I so I went surfing to the Academy of American Poets website www.poets.org to find out. That's a site featuring well- established poets. Even though Bernstein delights in roasting the poetry establishment, I found him listed. I could link to four of his poems (including a moving poem-essay written shortly after September 11, ) read over his biog and even see what he looks like. Unsurprisingly, for his critical glance at National Poetry Month you have to surf to http://plagiarist.com/articles/42.

Here's part of what Bernstein says:

"As an alternative to National Poetry Month, I propose that we have an International Anti-Poetry month. As part of the activities, all verse in public places will be covered over-from the Statue of Liberty to the friezes on many of our government buildings. Poetry will be removed from radio and TV (just as it is during the other eleven months of the year). Parents will be asked not to read Mother Goose and other rimes to their children but only ... fiction.

Religious institutions will have to forego reading verse passages from the liturgy and only prose translations of the Bible will recited, with hymns strictly banned. Ministers in the Black churches will be kindly requested to stop preaching. Cats will be closed for the month by order of the Anti-Poetry Commission. Poetry readings will be replaced by self-help lectures. Love letters will have to be written only in expository paragraphs ".

By this time, you get the idea. Just as we're all speaking prose, we're all revelling, rolling and rocking to rhythm, imagery and rhyme wherever we find them. Bernstein is also calling for a month bringing attention to the international, not national, nature of poetry. Poems speak to us across borders and time. To give an example that I like, Tu fu's poem that ends "Ducks in pairs drowse on the warm sand." (translator, Kenneth Rexroth)

The National Poetry Month mission statement begins "to highlight the extraordinary legacy and ongoing achievement of American poetry."

I think a politician, not a poet, wrote that goal. Poets are too busy with a common labor of love, translating other poets. Given their fervor and the dedication of multilingual poets (there are more than you think) poems cross borders and centuries amazingly easily even without the original music of the sounds..

To be fair, www.poets.org does offer up a wealth of information and links to poets from other cultures and times, besides connecting its readers to the National Poetry Month mission statement. But no one website can provide what Joan Baez might have called The Twelve Gates to the City of Poetry, Hallelujah. Besides, there are far more than a dozen ways of putting together a poem, in the varied languages of the world.

So here are a few more websites for stimulating your poetry gland, whether you are a reader or poet.

I like www.gobshite.com, the website of the magazine by the same name, which specializes in presenting poetry and fiction two versions, the original and in translation. You'll find poetry in Croatian and Spanish here, for example., .

For a further look at the work of Charles Bernstein and other poets considered "Language Poets" go to www.poetrypreviews.com/poets/language where you'll learn that this school of poets and thir readers "makes a path"rather than "designs a garden.." They say they're choosing to "clearcut" through the wild and thick brush of the English language." Following the links will help you to make up your own mind.

Many fine regional poets never make the poets.org list. For sensuous poems you can almost touch, go to www.crabcreekreview.com. There you can click on poems from its recent issue and besides view a page of links to other poetry sites listed by the generous editor..

You may be more positive than I am about the poems on www.writersalmanac.com. If so, you can arrange for a poem to land in your mailbox daily. The poetry editor at this site from public radio refrains from presenting the sweep of poetry in the United States today.

At any rate, you can build quite a respectable anthology from poems you find on the internet once you start exploring.

A Mexican poet recently said that Mexican poets are at least as outstanding as Mexican athletes, just less well known. Hey, he might have been talking about reading and writing poetry as a conscious tradition in the United States. Our poets, and you may know of many good poets beyond the celebrated ones, are good at what they do. Calling attention to them is part of what National Poetry Month, warts and all, is about..

And if you'd just as soon pass over poems by Anne Sexton, and John Ashbery, you may still be able to recite "Little Orphant Annie" that your teacher had you memorize back in primary school, one more piece of evidence that poetry sticks to the ribs.