In a post from April 13 on the blog (called "The Stream") over at Harpers.org, Tony Hoagland argues that we as a nation failed to keep the flame of poetry alive in education in the latter half of the century. Fresh from his bout at AWP where he presented "Camouflage & Capitalism: The Intellectual Appropriation of American Poetry" and beat-up academia for its affect on how we regard poetry in this country, Hoagland takes the mic at the press conference with his side of the fight: "Twenty Little Poems that Could Save America."
What I love about Hoagland's argument is how it appeals to me on an emotional level. Through clear scenes, Hoagland shows me students suffering through poems that are supposed to be "deep" or "complicated" and require, as he puts it, "a priest" to reveal its mysteries. I was reminded of a move he made in his presentation at AWP: a question he asked that basically went something like this: How many of us [he's referring to all of the writers and teachers of writing in his audience] while preparing for class, have considered two poems, both beautiful and interesting and worthy of discussion, but we choose the more complicated one because the students can "get" the easier one on their own, and because they're paying a lot of money for school, discussing the more complicated poem feels more appropriate. He presents scenes where people discuss some of the twenty poems he proposes, and in those scenes, people listen, people disagree, but people come to appreciate the craft.
Hoagland's "twenty poems" are not as "easy" as we might think, but the point seems to be that they encourage not the need for a priest class, but discussion. Honest, let's-talk-about-this, discussion. Considering how much we all seem to shout at each other, perhaps these poems might do some good.
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