–>
I was at a
gathering not long ago –the venue isn’t important– when I heard a soldier
recite a poem. He’d been struggling after getting home, and small wonder: twice
deployed to Afghanistan, he’d also been twice wounded, one of those times
pretty critically. He told us that the poem he gave us had kept him going
through several horrific ordeals.
I think the poem was called “Hope.”
It was awful.
For all its clichés and bromides,
however, that poem had been a literal life-saver for the man, so by what right
do I sneer at it?
Driving home after that get-together
where I heard the GI, I got to thinking back some twenty years, when my wife
and I were sitting one evening in a backcountry restaurant. Apart from us,
there were only three patrons: a mother, her adult daughter, and her
son-in-law. The daughter had composed a poem for her mom’s birthday, and we
couldn’t help overhearing it. That poem too was awful.
But again, how do we claim the
superiority of “high art”?
Such a matter provides much food for
thought, no? I mean to avoid strong opinionation, to make clear that my
judgments are that, period: my
judgments, hence not ones with any special authority. So if I ask you to
consider quality vs. awfulness here, I mean primarily to raise an issue, not to
offer some pat and prescriptive solution to it myself; I’m far from convinced
that one is available.
The soldier and the daughter poet
moved their listeners, certainly, more than many of the recent (and to me
inscrutable) I have
seen in print.
What do we make of that?