I'm at the lake for a last few days before we have to take down the hammock, bring in the dock, blow out the water lines, pour in anti-freeze, and close up for winter. There's lake life, and then there's city life (if we think of our little Traverse City as the "big city"). Both lives are, joyfully, within range for my husband and me.
Which makes me think of variation and difference, and keeping both within range.
Which makes me think of newspapers, the paper kind, and how they keep the variety of the world within reach.
You can't click on one part and ignore the rest. Your eye has to float over the whole spread-out page, or at least the folded page. You may accidentally get caught by something you didn't mean to read. Like a column on poetry.
Which makes me think of the rest of the humanities -- art, music, dance, theater -- and how we discover them and learn to love them because someone took us to a performance, or a museum, or a poetry reading, at an age when we were still open, still exploring.
We might have said, "Oh yuk, do I have to sit through that?" I've required students to attend a (high-quality) poetry reading, and they've returned to class wide-eyed, saying "I didn't know it could be so good!"
Mark Slouka has an essay in the September issue of Harper's Magazine called "Dehumanized." He writes, "I believe that what rules us is less the material world of goods and services than the immaterial one of whims, assumptions, delusions and lies; that only by studying this world can we hope to shape how it shapes us; that only by attempting to understand what used to be called, in a less embarrassed age, 'the human condition' can we hope to make our condition more human, not less."
In a corporate culture, only visible, marketable products have value. Huge private and government grants lure teachers into math and science.
"Classes in history, art and foreign languages are cut back to make room for their more practical, 'rigorous,' cousins," Slouka notes.
Poetry, and the arts in general, as they attempt to touch the hem of the invisible, don't make a profit; their value can't be measured.
Those who work in the arts often end up frantically trying to prove that there's practical, measurable value in what they do, so that someone, anyone, will take notice.
All of which has to do also with newspapers. How much profit do they have to make to be deemed worthy of existence? Would it be enough just to break even, or do they have to make money for shareholders? What do we mean by having "value" -- and now I'm talking from the point of view of a poet as well as a reader of newspapers.
The whole point of reading, of learning, is to put us in contact with the "other," that which we don't know, which we don't yet understand, which we maybe don't even believe in. Particularly art, music and poetry -- if they do their job, they leave us unmoored, a little baffled. We hadn't seen the world this way before!
When I open the newspaper, about half the time I have to confront political cartoons I vehemently disagree with, columnists I don't like, editorials on subjects I'm not particularly interested in.
My eye skims articles I couldn't care less about, but because they're there, I glance over them, and sometimes get sucked in.
What I disagree with isn't buried in a Web site menu that I know not to click on. Newspapers are, in my view, the bulwark of our democracy, the Walter Cronkite we still have with us.
Which brings me back to poetry -- my own chosen art form. After we outgrow "Green Eggs and Ham," we aren't going to automatically love or understand poetry. We have to be exposed to it, often, and in varied forms. We have to learn how to read it, how to hear it.
Poetry isn't a trivial or decorative art. We are shaped by what we read. We become LESS like each other, more like ourselves, the more we expose ourselves to what's on the periphery of the mainstream, to the art forms that push our inner world and stretch us out of shape.
This is a deeply civic function, no less than reading newspapers. We cannot be controlled if we're taught to read well, to understand nuance, to make our way past the various and glittering surfaces of things to the truths that live beneath them.
Fleda Brown is professor emerita, University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware. For more of Fleda Brown's On Poetry columns, log on to record-eagle.com/onpoetry.
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