Melville House Books

Yesterday, in response to David Orr‘s NYT essay about the poetry issue of O: The Oprah Magazine, in which he objects to “using poetry to overcome personal challenges,” I wondered whether poetry can or should serve such practical purposes. Is poetry meant to rehabilitate or teach or “get you through a hard time”? I understand how applying therapeutic principles to poetry can cheapen it. Literature should disturb as much as comfort, and who wants poetry to be equivalent with pep talks or self-help? Still, it seems problematic if poems are so ethereal that they pass untouched and untouching through daily life—like, say, those trillions of neutrinos you read about in the science section.

Recently Sam Tanenhaus wrote an essay at the NYT’s Arts Beat blog about “The Poetry of Catastrophe” which speaks wonderfully to literature’s ability to confront the unspeakable:

One of the enduring paradoxes of great apocalyptic writing is that it consoles even as it alarms.This has been, in fact, one of the enduring “social” functions of literature—specifically, of poetry. Narrative prose is less well suited to the task. This isn’t surprising: narrative implies continuity and order….

But catastrophe defies logic. It faces us with disruption and discontinuity, with the breakdown of order. The same can often be said of poetry itself. It operates outside the realm of “logic.” Rather, it obeys the logic of dreams, of the unconscious. This is especially the case with lyric poetry, with its suggestion of vision and prophecy.

Which puts me in mind of the book that launched Melville House as a publishing house, Poetry After 9/11, which—astonishingly—has its 10-year re-release this summer. The forward attests to how oddly useful poetry had become:

There were, in the immediate aftermath, poems everywhere. Walking around the city you would see them—stuck on lights posts and phone stalls, plastered on the shelters at bus stops and the walls of subway stations….It put one in mind of Adorno’s famous statement: No more poetry in the wake of the Holocaust. And yet, there it was, everywhere. Prose wasn’t enough. There was something more to be said that only poetry could say. Everybody, apparently, knew this.

Tanenhaus’s Art Beat post ends asking for people to send in more catastrophic verses because “To name the catastrophic demon won’t slay it. But it can help chase our fears out of the shadows.” In that spirit, here’s the final stanza from Stephen Dunn‘s “Grudges” from Melville House‘s first book.

Before you know it something’s over.

Suddenly someone’s missing at the table.

It’s easy (I know it) for anything to occur

when men feel one way, act another.