Being anti-gay marriage is anti-intellectual and bigoted. Period.

Judith

Don’t academics credit sources any more? I published Uppity Stone Age Venus and an Hottentot Slave on 14 December. Same cartoon, some similar points, same time.

What ho?

Judith

First and foremost, poetry is intended to be spoken, whether by the author or the reader, and the breaks and punctuation (pauses in reading) frame much of the intent and meaning. Second, good poetry (and there is a great deal of very poor modern poetry) requires an immersion into it; rather than once a year (or every 12 years) one needs to spend a day with lots of good poets reading good poetry.

For example, my friends and i help produce the Watershed Poetry Festival in Berkeley at the end of each summer. We invite the finest environmental poets from around the country (and the world) to provide readings of their work, in hopes that children will be inspired to connect the wonders of the Earth with their minds through poems. Some of the newer pieces have come from biologists and botanists writing about the flora and fauna they research, sharing their discoveries in new and unique ways (versus journal articles).

On the subject of poetry, Cocteau may have said it best: “Poetry is indispensable…if I only knew what for.” I had the good fortune to witness Clinton’s inauguration in 1993 in person, and heard Maya Angelou recite “On the Pulse of Morning”. Maybe the cold left my brain especially addled that day, but while I understood the words well enough, I can’t say I really “got it” at that moment. Nor did my companions. In fact, the talk of of Apaches and mendicants and mastodons, recited in Ms. Angelou’s soothing cadences, while evocative of something, seemed to leave the whole crowd around me, after politely applauding, wondering quite what.

Not many of us are used to hearing poetry read aloud to us, and it can be difficult enough extract the author’s meaning from some of it even when we can read it on the page as carefully as we like. I’m not sure if we were moved quite as much as we were meant to be back in 1993, and I didn’t feel as if I was being transported back to Camelot to relive some magical American ritual. I dunno about this inaugural poetry thing. It can be surprisingly underwhelming, IMO. Can the best work of a modern poet appeal to most folks when recited, by its very nature? And if not, is there any point?

crumbs become stalactites
set in perfect angles

of geometry I’d thought
impossible. Few will

ever see what I see
through these equations.

I may read them
wrong. And be mistaken

about Labias, Elephants
Evolution and Continents.

But even if I am only right
the dinosaur’s toenail

Boy, I will take it
And continue my solitary search

So we can eventually learn to tell
the Truth
from what is deformed and unnatural

Even if the price I pay
is a shriveled mind and a hard heart
and utterly wrong theories about labias.