Poetry on the Offense

 

Image by MorningbirdPhoto from Pixabay

I get a bit annoyed when I see online discussions about the "death of poetry" or "in defense of poetry."  Sometimes those headlines are more clickbait than anything and end up talking about about the popularity and power of poetry. Still, it is annoying that poets and lovers of poetry feel a need to defend what they love because it is under attack.

Poetry as an oral art form likely predates written text. The earliest poetry is believed to have been recited or sung, as a way of remembering oral history, genealogy, and even law. Early writing shows clear traces of older oral traditions, including the use of repeated phrases as building blocks in larger poetic units. A rhythmic and repetitious form would make a long story easier to remember and retell, before writing was available as a reminder. 

People still read ancient works, from the Vedas (1500 - 1000 BC) to the Odyssey (800 - 675 BC), which appear to have been composed in poetic form to aid memorization and oral transmission.

Poetry appears among the earliest records of most literate cultures, with poetic fragments found on early monoliths, runestones, and stelae.

Deluge tablet of the Gilgamesh epic, circa 2nd millennium BC.

A 2015 article says that "Some people are still reading [poetry], although that number has been dropping steadily over the past two decades. In 1992, 17 percent of Americans had read a work of poetry at least once in the past year. 20 years later that number had fallen by more than half, to 6.7 percent." Jump to a 2018 NEA report which said that it seems to be more popular than ever. “Nearly 12 percent (11.7 percent) of adults read poetry in the last year, according to new data from the National Endowment for the Arts' 2017 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA). That's 28 million adults.

On the defensive side, a Washington Post article with the headline "Poetry is going extinct government-data show" is actually saying that "Poetry is not dying, it is merely changing. Poetry is essential to human life. It allows us to convey our thoughts and emotions through beautiful, sometimes horrible, words."

Is poetry endangered? "Languages are dying at the rate of every two weeks. Of the 7,000 languages spoken in the world over half of these are endangered. By the end of the century half the world's current languages will be lost which will also mean the loss of unique poetic traditions." I don't put poetry in the endangered species category, but the UK "Endangered Poetry Project" is fighting extinction. 

You can find a number of arguments that poetry is not dying, it is merely changing. So, why title this post "Poetry on the Offense"? The war in Ukraine was just the latest example of how poets go on the offense rather than in defense with their writing in hard times. Poetry gives voice to many things - personal and global. 

A search on Ukraine + poetry + war turns up many examples of that.

Poetry I alive, well and in the world every day.

---

Visit our website at poetsonline.org

---

The Federal Writers' Project

In March of 1933, a newly inaugurated President Franklin D. Roosevelt called a special session of Congress and began the first hundred days of enacting his New Deal legislation. You probably had a history class that talked about the almost daily bills that were passed, including the Emergency Banking Act, Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Public Works Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. It seems more incredible today in a time when Congress has so many problems agreeing on and passing any legislation.

One of the New Deal’s cultural programs that may not have gotten any attention in history class is worth noting. That is the Federal Writers’ Project. It is a program that would seem almost impossible to get support for in the current administration.

The project employed more than 6,600 out-of-work writers, editors, and researchers. Some of the names are familiar — Zora Neale Hurston, John Cheever, Conrad Aiken, Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, Studs Terkel, Ralph Ellison, Kenneth Patchen, Kenneth Rexroth, May Swenson, Richard Wright — but many of them were struggling writers who were not famous and did not become well known.

The benefits were minimal subsistence wages of around $20 a week.

One of the main writing projects was the American Guides Series. They were guidebooks to to each of the existing states of the time, as well as Alaska, Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia, and several major cities and highways. But beyond being travel guides, they also had essays on various subjects from geography and history to architecture and commerce.

Another project was to collect the life histories of more than 10,000 Americans under the direction of folklore editor Benjamin A. Botkin. The writers interviewed people of all socioeconomic, racial, and cultural backgrounds. They also collected first-person accounts of more than 2,300 former slaves, which were assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the 17-volume “Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves.”

Not everyone saw value in the FWP. Opponents of President Roosevelt thought the New Deal would ruin the country, and some considered the New Deal a Communist plot.

Poet W.H. Auden called it “one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by a state.”

The FWP produced 275 books, 700 pamphlets, and 340 “issuances” — assorted leaflets, radio scripts, and articles. Although states were permitted to continue Writers’ Project programs until 1943, the federal program was terminated in 1939, due to the country’s need for a larger defense budget.

A National Endowment for the Humanities-funded documentary about the Federal Writers' Project, entitled Soul of a People: Writing America's Story premiered on the Smithsonian Channel in September 2009. The film includes interviews with notable American authors Studs Terkel, Stetson Kennedy, and popular American historian Douglas Brinkley. The companion book is Soul of a People: The WPA Writers' Project Uncovers Depression America.

The Slave Narratives are represented by the HBO documentary, Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives which features actors such as Angela Bassett and Samuel L. Jackson performing dramatic readings of the transcripts.

The 1999 film Cradle Will Rock, by Tim Robbins, while depicting the events of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), dramatizes the attacks against Federal One (via the House Committee on Un-American Activities) which helped shutter both the thaeter (FTP) and the writers (FWP) projects.

Source: The Writer's Almanac