By DONNA URSCHEL
Poetry scholars, writers, publishers and fans packed the Mumford Room on April 4 to attend the Library of Congress Bicentennial Symposium "Poetry and the American People: Reading, Voice and Publication in the 19th and 20th Centuries."
Panelists provided perspectives on the historical context of poetry, on the state of publishing and on poetry as a medium of expression to an enthusiastic crowd, which responded with lively questions and comments.
Also, the producers of the "Favorite Poem Project" film provided a behind-the-scenes look at the challenges of filming the poetry readings, complete with humorous outtakes of the film.
The symposium was part of a two-day event, "Poetry in America: A Library of Congress Bicentennial Celebration," which started on Monday evening, April 3, with readings of "favorite poems" by Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky and other poets. Mr. Pinsky also presented the first video and audio recordings from his "Favorite Poem Project" to a standing-room-only crowd in the Coolidge Auditorium.
The symposium was sponsored by the Center for the Book, the Madison Council and the Poetry and Literature Center, all in the Library of Congress; the Poetry Society of America; and the Academy of American Poets. John Cole, the Center for the Book director, and Prosser Gifford, the Library's director of Scholarly Programs, moderated the panels.
Experts in the history of reading launched the symposium with a discussion on "Recovering the Experiences of American Readers." They were David D. Hall, Harvard University Divinity School; Barbara Sicherman, Trinity College; and Joan Shelley Rubin, Department of History, University of Rochester.
Mr. Hall cited Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, to demonstrate how reader responses to a book change over the years and can differ depending on a reader's perspective.
"We can fashion a history of reading by two principal objectives: one, understand the text that readers encounter and, two, understand the responses of readers themselves," said Mr. Hall.
"Text most certainly imposes itself on readers. Who hasn't been either captured and swept away by what they've read or suspicious of and unbelieving of what they've read?" he asked.
Ms. Sicherman, the next speaker, showed how reading changes consciousness and, in turn, changes lives. She examined the reading of two women in the late 19th century, Katherine Thomas, who later became president of Bryn Mawr College, and Rose G. Cohen, who wrote an autobiography, "Out of the Shadow."
"In different ways, reading helped Thomas and Cohen to attain more self-assertive identities than were expected of women in their time and place," she said.
Ms. Sicherman concluded, "The imaginative space opened up by reading can, under the right circumstances, stimulate creativity and foster a reciprocal, rather than a one-way, relationship between books and lives."
The third participant of the panel, Ms. Rubin, traced the love of poetry among several figures in the 19th century to show that "poetry has been a vibrant, active presence in the lives of American people."
The second panel examined "Poetry and Voice." It included Kenneth Cmiel, Department of History, University of Iowa; Paul Breslin, Department of English, Northwestern University; and Mr. Pinsky.
Mr. Cmiel presented a comprehensive history of poetry, observing how in the 19th century "poetry held a different place in the world than it does today."
"In the mid-19th century, a poet could be conceived of as an unacknowledged legislator of the world; a president like Lincoln could occasionally greet visitors with a poem, and by the time you went through the sixth McGuffey reader, you had read Milton, Burns, Longfellow, Pope, William C. Bryant and Shakespeare, among others," he said.
Through the years, Mr. Cmiel said, poetry shifts in purpose, from a more public, civic role to a more personal form of expression. "Poetry is a quieter voice in the culture," he said. One reason is that poetry had to jostle with all sorts of mass culture.
From 1890 to 1920, the sound culture underwent major shifts that affected poetry. In the 1890s, the popular music industry exploded, with mechanically reproduced sounds such as the player piano and in the 1920s, the radio.
"Poetry is a mix of cadence and words, and music is a mix of cadence, words, melody and harmony. Music is not the same as poetry. Always in music, words are diminished, because some part of the oral response is devoted to the melody, the harmony, the beat," he said.
"Pop music becomes so important in the culture, it pushes poetry and the form of poetic expression to a different place," Mr. Cmiel concluded.
A second thing that changes in those years is the rise of plain-style prose, as espoused in Strunk and White's Elements of Style. "Rhetoric falls off the map," Mr. Cmiel said. "
Oratory falls off the map as well," he added. It is replaced by a conversational -- unaffected, informal -- style of speaking in public. Oratory, according to Mr. Cmiel, was a sister art to poetry. It, too, was about words, rhythm and cadence.
Even in music, the new conversational style was evident in crooning, and the person to truly master the new conversational style in public was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt with his "fireside chats."
Although poetry is diminished, it continues to be one of the fine arts and holds a strong place in our culture, said Mr. Cmiel. In this "loud culture" of today, poetry can provide a moment of quiet, a gentle way to bring some expression to the wonders of life.
But Mr. Cmiel warns that there is a danger: "We can't let poetry become "too quiet or too personal," lest people will stop reading and writing it all together.
The next panelist was Mr. Breslin, who relayed his recent experience at a Chicago Uptown poetry "slam," an informal event in which participants recite poetry as a performance art.
"What I liked about the slam was its openness and spontaneity. It was not a sanctimonious location; it was a bar. What I don't like is the competitive aspect of the event, the instant response and critique of the audience."
The last member of the "Poetry and Voice" panel was Mr. Pinsky, who ironically lost his voice to laryngitis and spoke only briefly. "In poetry, the voice that matters is not the voice of the skilled performer and it's not the voice of the professor; it's the voice of whoever likes the work of art," Mr. Pinsky said.
"If poetry is on the uprise, it is the response to an elegant, beautiful mass culture," Mr. Pinsky added.
The panelists then took questions from the audience. One woman asked a question that elicited a variety of opinions throughout the symposium. She explained that she writes poetry, but people have advised her that her poems are not universal. "What makes a poem universal?" she asked.
Mr. Pinsky was the first to answer. He said it is the physical appeal of the poem, the elegance and beauty of the sound that creates its universality. "If it is arranged artfully enough," Mr. Pinsky said, "the reader will hang on until he understands it."
Mr. Breslin said the poem needs to be "utterly true to experience" to be universal. But Mr. Gifford, the Library's Office of Scholarly Programs director, said perceptions change. "Byron used to be considered universal. Universality is subject to taste."
Another question from an English teacher generated laughter from many in the audience: "I'd like to bring this answer home to my students. Could you explain to them why English teachers make them memorize and recite poetry?"
Mr. Breslin, who makes his students memorize two poems per quarter, provided an answer, "You don't really get inside the poem until you read it out loud. So when you memorize the poem, it starts to be a part of you. You have to live with it awhile."
In the third panel, "Making of the Favorite Poem Project and Tapes," Maggie Dietz, project director; Juanita Anderson, executive producer; and other members of the production team discussed their efforts to film the poetry readings.
Ms. Anderson said it was a challenge to find ways to make the poems come alive. In addition to the reading, Ms. Anderson said she was trying to convey a sense of who the reader was and a sense of place.
"People ask, 'How did you get everyone to be so intimate?' It was abonding process. You let them get to know you. You have to have a conversation, and you have to get them to forget the cameras are there," Ms. Anderson explained.
The fourth panel, "Poets and Publishers," included four participants: Jerry W. Ward, Tougaloo College; Robert Boyers, editor, Salmagundi; Leslie Morris, Harvard College Library, and Jack Shoemaker, publisher, Counterpoint.
Mr. Boyers, whose magazine receives 5,000 unsolicited manuscripts per year, said there is a lot of good poetry out there -- "many, many excellent poets" -- but it's hard to get published. Many magazines tend to go with writers who are previously published. He said a proliferation of writing programs has generated more manuscripts.
"In short, although there is too much poetry out there to take in, much is admirable and compelling," said Mr. Boyers.
Mr. Ward, a critic, writer and editor whose most recent work is Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African American Poetry (1997), said he disagrees with Mr. Pinsky's affection for poetry on the Internet. (The poet laureate is the poetry editor for the online magazine Slate.) "While there's some good things to be said of the Internet, poetry still loves the page vs. the screen. I still want the look and the feel of the printed page," Mr. Ward said.
Even when Mr. Ward writes poetry, he prefers pencil and paper. "At certain stages of composition, I must have the evolving product on the page and not on the screen," he said.
Ms. Morris, an archivist at the Harvard College Library, discussed how James Laughlin founded and operated his literary magazine, New Directions, which she described as a case study in poetry publishing. Funded by a wealthy aunt, Mr. Laughlin ran his magazine in the red for 40 years. In the 1970s, it started to make a profit. His philosophy, Ms. Morris said, was to publish only what he liked.
She read excerpts from letters exchanged between Mr. Laughlin and William Carlos Williams. She also discussed Mr. Laughlin's dealings with the troubled Dylan Thomas. "Jay [Mr. Laughlin] attracted and kept good poets because he cared for their interests in every way," she said.
Mr. Shoemaker, the last panelist to speak, provided a historical context to the last 40 years of poetry publishing. In the '60s and early '70s, there was a golden age of poetry publishing, because of a proliferation of small- press magazines. In the late '70s and the '80s, the poetry market was abysmal. "Poetry sales plummeted, the small press disappeared; there was a crisis in publishing," he said.
The '90s, however, has been a time of expansion, with brisk poetry sales and the appearance of poetry slams. Writing schools are crammed, according to Mr. Shoemaker.
"This is a time on fire. As poets and publishers, we can enjoy ourselves for this moment," he said.
On that positive note, the symposium moved to its concluding event, the reading of their own poetry by Joshua Weiner, Naomi Shihab Nye, Robert Pinsky, Rita Dove, Louise Glück, and W.S. Merwin. Ms. Urschel is a freelance writer in the Public Affairs Office. Panelists at the Bicentennial Symposium "Poetry and the American People: Reading, Voice and Publication in the 19th and 20th Centuries" included David Hall, Barbara Sicherman and Joan Shelley Rubin.
Ms. Urschel is a freelance writer in the Public Affairs Office.