small, unnecessary devotions

So what are we left with? Perhaps nothing more than the realization that much of life is devoted to things that in the end don’t matter very much, except to us. Time passes whether we like it or not, and its too-quick progress is measured out in private longings and solitary trivialities as much as in choices we might defend to a skeptical audience. This isn't to say there aren't reasons for us to love the things we love - Robert Frost was wrong, or at least not entirely right, to say that we "love the things we love for what they are." But those reasons can be difficult to describe in the way that it's hard to describe what red looks like, or how one's relationship with a child or parent feels. The same is true of poetry. I can’t tell you why you should bother to read poems, or to write them; I can only say that if you do choose to give your attention to poetry, as against all the other things you might turn to instead, that choice can be meaningful. There’s little grandeur in this, maybe, but out of such small, unnecessary devotions is the abundance of our lives sometimes made evident.

- David Orr, in the chapter entitled "Why Bother?" in his book Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry.

welcomes and confounds

When a nonspecialist audience is responding well to a poem, its reaction is a kind of tentative pleasure, a puzzled interest that resembles the affection a traveler bears for a destination that both welcomes and confounds him. For such readers, then, it’s not necessarily helpful to talk about poetry as if it were a device to be assembled or a religious experience to be undergone. Rather, it would be useful to talk about poetry as if it were, for example, Belgium.

- David Orr, in the introduction to his book Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry.

at the mercy of someone else's display

On the new poetry-focused issue of O Magazine, and one photo-spread in particular:

“Spring Fashion Modeled by Rising Young Poets.” The words are heart-sinking. For some readers, this will be because poetry represents a higher form of culture that can only be debased by the commentary of Oprah Winfrey and the pencil skirts of L’Wren Scott. But this isn’t quite right. Any critic knows there are dozens of poetry collections published every year that are considerably less culturally valuable than Winfrey’s many enterprises and that could only be improved by pencil skirts, preferably by being wrapped in several of them and chucked in the East River. The problem is that poetry can’t approach the world inhabited by O and fashion design — that is, the world of American mass culture — with the same swagger as other fields do. When Terrell Owens holds forth on poetry in O (yes, he does), much of the audience knows that Owens is a football player, and has at least a vague idea of what football is, what it means and why it inspires otherwise reasonable people to put Styrofoam cheese slices on their heads. But poets and poetry readers... we can’t bring our context with us. We’re at the mercy of someone else’s display. The sad thing about “Spring Fashion Modeled by Rising Young Poets” is not that the photos are a debasement of Art. The sad thing is that they capture an inevitable and impossible yearning. The chasm between the audience for poetry and the audience for O is vast, and not even the mighty Oprah can build a bridge from empty air.

- David Orr, in his essay "Oprah Magazine's Adventures in Poetry" in the New York Times' Sunday Book Review. He goes on to talk about how questions like "where does poetry come from?" inevitably lead to answers "that make poetry sound like God’s own electric Kool-Aid acid test." Funny, smart stuff. Read the whole thing here.

p.s. Kathleen Rooney posted this response to Orr on the Harriet blog. An excerpt:

Those who declare—as David Orr does in the New York Times—that “The chasm between the audience for poetry and the audience for O is vast, and not even the mighty Oprah can build a bridge from empty air” fail to properly credit not Winfrey but poetry. One hopes that they do so out of an honest ignorance of the role poetry actually plays in the lives of most people who read, write, and share it. One fears, however, that they do so out of a desire to preserve poetry as a domain of connoisseurs, as an elite signifier for the educated and affluent. Someone may be well-served by this attitude; poetry is not.