Poet’s Choice
Publishing House: Harcourt
Rated: NONE
WorkNameSort: Poet’s Choice
Even though April has become Poetry Month, and Poetry magazine has inherited some $200 million, the versifying art still needs its stewards. Thanks to the advent of free verse in the 20th century, anything is poetry today. Songwriters publish their lyrics as if Walt Whitman would gnash his teeth in jealousy. Poetry is taught in colleges as a healing art, just shy of journaling.
Into this vacuum steps Edward Hirsch. A populist with a firm sense of tradition, he has been a voice of reason and education as the ‘Poet’s Choiceâ?� columnist for The Washington Post. Each week, Hirsch hauled a poem down from the rafters of obscurity and dusted it off for curious readers. This hefty volume collects 130 of these columns and puts them in a roughly chronological order.
The resulting book reads like a breezy yet engaging hopscotch game of poetic tradition. Hirsch leaps from the odes of Pindar to the craggy meditations of Robert Penn Warren, always landing on two feet. Part of this steadiness has to do with the sheer sensual pleasure he appears to take in reading his way through the greats, along with a consistent intellectual curiosity that seeps into his voice. He is fond of Wendy Cope’s English doggerel and Roland Flint’s poems of political protest. His heart goes out to Deborah Digges, who memorialized her husband with a poem about the seersucker suit he left behind.
Critics who like to bend poets over their knee and give them a paddling will probably snigger at this voluptuous receptivity. But Hirsch doesn’t seem to care. One of the terribly likable things about this volume is his willingness to believe that there is simply more good poetry in the world than we can know. In Hirsch’s mind, the trick is in finding it and ‘ in our climate of media saturation ‘ giving people an excuse to read it.
This article appears in May 10-16, 2006.