April is National Poetry Month, but for New York Times Book Review poetry columnist David Orr, the literary art with a perennially shrinking fan base is his life’s work, occupying all months of every year. This month, coincidentally or not, Orr has released his first book of criticism, Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide To Modern Poetry. In it, Orr attempts to lessen the mystique that surrounds the form, in the possibly vain hope of expanding the audience for modern poetry. (Will people averse to reading poetry itself instead flock to read about poetry?) However, with Beautiful & Pointless, Orr mingles humor (“all the best poets eat at Taco Bell”) with analysis (“I really do believe that poetry is hard to recommend”) in a way that should provide fodder for novices and academics in equal measure. On the occasion of his book’s release and this month’s celebration of poetry, Orr sat down with The A.V. Club to discuss William Carlos Williams’ wheelbarrow, Robert Pinsky’s blind love for writers who’ve been shot at, and OutKast’s possible kinship with Martians.
The A.V. Club: Is the aim of Beautiful & Pointless to make poetry appear less daunting so readers might feel less intimidated? Isn’t part of poetry’s appeal its perceived mysticism or aloofness?
David Orr: Sort of. On one hand, you want to sort of keep poetry for yourself. You grow to love it for various reasons, and you feel that you know certain things about it, so you want to keep poetry in kind of the space that’s been created for it by other people like yourself. On the other hand, everybody wants to see how the rest of the culture would really respond to the art form. I think there is a lot of fear about that. I know I have some fear about that sometimes. I think part of the mystification that goes on with poetry comes out of that fear. It’s sort of like if we mystified it enough and nobody’s really sure what it actually is, then we don’t really have to worry about it being judged. I guess I’ve always felt like—or, at least, I’ve come to feel—we don’t need to worry about that quite so much. I think poetry is sturdy enough to handle any kind of scrutiny. So the goal of the book is to give people what I think is basically an honest take on it, just from my perspective—other people will feel very differently about it—so they can feel comfortable looking at poetry really for what it is.
AVC: It’s interesting that you consider poetry “sturdy,” especially when music and literature don’t seem as sturdy as they once were. What about poetry makes it seem better equipped to survive?
DO: Good question. Obviously, I’m going to be biased in my response, because I’m a poetry critic. But I do think poetry really flourishes in anxiety. Poetry, especially lyric poetry, relies so heavily on ambiguity, it’s almost inevitable that it’s also going to stir up a lot of anxiety in the people who write it. I think all the issues you talked about—which are significant sources of anxiety for a lot of different types of artists—I wouldn’t say poets are uniquely able to deal with them. But I think, in a way, maybe poets have dealt with them in the past a little bit more thoroughly than some other art forms. Something does come from having almost always been kind of a marginal art. When suddenly other arts become marginal too, you’re not quite as worried, I think.
AVC: So if you never aimed for widespread success in the first place, you’re immune to failure?
DO: [Laughs.] Well, we try not to set the bar too low. There’s a difference between the achievement that an art has as an art and then the position of an art in a culture. Of course, it’s impossible to compare these things, really, but if you think about the best poems, are they as good as the best recordings of classical music? Sure, I think they are. Although I don’t know how on earth you would compare anything like that. I think poetry is an art of high achievement. But that’s different from where poetry sits in the culture, which is pretty much always on the sidelines. And it probably always will be on the sidelines, too. Look, even a book like mine—I’m not expecting that suddenly people are going to be out in the grocery stores leafing through tabloids and then picking up a book of poetry. I’m just hoping that people, if they are interested, if they want to, can maybe read some poetry if they’d like to.
AVC: But with the immediacy of social media, why bother interpreting some obscure poem and its individual perspective when there are all of these other outlets now to express yourself bluntly and immediately?
DO: I guess there’s two responses to that. The first one is, when we’re talking about poetry and saying it’s obscure and so forth, the reason it’s obscure is because we’re not familiar with it. If you are familiar with something, it doesn’t seem obscure. If you imagine a Martian coming down and listening to OutKast, the Martian is going to be totally perplexed. Unless OutKast has more experience in outer space than I think they do. Even beyond that, even if you look at stuff like… If you think about social media and the way this stuff works, people are still very interested in creating personal symbolism. You see people spending a lot of their time choosing ringtones. You see people spending hours and hours picking their photographs for their Facebook page. I think for a lot of people, poetry serves—or can serve—a similar function. People have relationships with poems. It’s sort of a pseudo-relationship, as I say in the book, but it is something that feels real to you. You have to be a little careful with that kind of a thing, because going too far down that line of thinking might lead you to think poetry is like therapy or something, which it’s not. But it does really serve a symbolic function for some people. And, honestly, it’s also short, which doesn’t hurt.