Melville House Books

Anna Moschovakis

Writing in the New York Times Book Review, David Orr contemplates the fashion shoot of young female poets in O: The Oprah Magazine’s first poetry issue, and feels that something is terribly amiss.

“Spring Fashion Modeled by Rising Young Poets.” The words are heart-sinking. For some readers, this will be because poetry represents a higher form of culture that can only be debased by the commentary of Oprah Winfrey and the pencil skirts of L’Wren Scott. But this isn’t quite right. Any critic knows there are dozens of poetry collections published every year that are considerably less culturally valuable than Winfrey’s many enterprises and that could only be improved by pencil skirts, preferably by being wrapped in several of them and chucked in the East River. The problem is that poetry can’t approach the world inhabited by O and fashion design — that is, the world of American mass culture — with the same swagger as other fields do.

He continues:

The sad thing about “Spring Fashion Modeled by Rising Young Poets” is not that the photos are a debasement of Art. The sad thing is that they capture an inevitable and impossible yearning. The chasm between the audience for poetry and the audience for O is vast, and not even the mighty Oprah can build a bridge from empty air.

Orr seems particularly dubious about the magazine’s emphasis on what he calls “Magical Poetry Talk”—poetry’s alleged powers to heal, alter, and change our lives. He wishes that the magazine would “talk about the actual experience of reading a poem. Not why poems are good at rehabilitating people. Not where poems come from. Not what they can help us do, or forget, or remember.” He seems to be referring to the series of short interviews titled “Poetry That Will Get You Through a Hard Time” in which writers like Nick Flynn or Sharon Olds describe poems that helped them face troubles: fatherhood, divorce, etc. Though for the sake of argument, and to strike a populist stance, why can’t the “experience” of reading a poem also “help” in some way? Is that too functional a desire to have? Has poetry become so aestheticized that it cannot serve some basic human need?

I tend to agree with Orr that fashion shoots will never bring poetry back into the popular culture fold. So how can the “the chasm” between poetry and popular culture be crossed? And should it? As National Poetry Month approaches, it seems a worthwhile topic to consider.