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Poetry Saves
What Is Poetry?
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Creative Arts Book Company, 2000. 112 pages.
Reviewed by Michael Wilt
Several years ago, poet Dana Gioia wrote an essay, and then a book, entitled Can Poetry Matter? He asserted that it was “time to leave the well-ordered but stuffy classroom, time to restore a vulgar vitality to poetry and unleash the energy now trapped in the subculture.” By doing so, Gioia said, the “unkillable phoenix” would “rise from the ashes.”
Now Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a contemporary poet who should require no introduction, asks an even more fundamental question, What is poetry?, and provides fifty or so haiku-like responses that borrow from, echo, and sometimes wrestle with poets of the near and distant past.
“Poetry is news / from the frontiers / of consciousness” is Ferlinghetti’s opening reply to the title’s question, and all the answers that follow reiterate that poetry is indeed the domain of those who are truly conscious. It is “what we would cry out / upon awaking in a dark wood / in the middle of the journey / of our life.” Dante would no doubt agree.
Ferlinghetti began addressing the question of what poetry is in the late 1950s, and has continued to update and enlarge his answer ever since. He calls on, among others, Hopkins, Rimbaud, Dickinson, the Song of Songs, Blake.
[Poetry] hears the whisper
of elephants
and sees how many angels dance
on the head of a pin
He argues with his forebears: “Poetry should be emotion / recollected in emotion,” not in tranquility, as Wordsworth asserted. He challenges basic categories and risks giving offense: “Poetry is religion / Religion is poetry.” He even calls on his own bibliography: “A poem is its own Coney Island of / the mind.”
Ferlinghetti’s answers seem to all come from the heart; they are a cry from the poet’s heart to the heart of the poet in each and every one of us. He answers Dana Gioia’s question, too: Can poetry matter? For Ferlinghetti, poetry must matter. He closes with a call to allow poetry to save the world, and by the end of this slim and exhilarating volume, the reader should be at least at the verge of believing in that possibility.
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