Last night a few of us drove to Seattle to hear Galway Kinnel read: he is a poet whose voice commands great authority and he commits many poems to heart. His poems were great, and so was the delivery. So it was a boost for the project of this blog, which does feel a little silly when I stop to think about it. The memorization, though, has given me something more interesting to do than read Time magazine when I find myself waiting at the doctor's office without a book. In lieu of transcendental meditation.



Kinnel has also got me to thinking about civic oratory, about poems that fall within a loose category that I'd call the civil tradition. I'd argue that poetry of the past, at least some significant portion of it, intended to speak for us all as a culture and was an important part of the social glue. Errr...I'm shuffling through the mental database...well Frost certainly, some of Yeats, even Wallace Stevens had this intention. But now it is not so easy. We are suspicious of grand claims and, when it comes to language, prefer the demotic. Kinnell did seem to be a writing poems that are larger than himself--even though he's already pretty tall.



But he's not the poet I want to type here now. For a few weeks I've had a New Yorker on my desk that contains a poem by Philip Levine. He's an example of someone who maybe speaks to our larger American selves while at the same time keeping his writing free of oratorial grand gestures.



A View of Home



From Ontario's shore one sees

the smoking stacks of breweries,

the ore boats beached and fuming,

the satanic stove factory

where my great-uncle lost fairh

in serf-work, and sold his birthright,

his hip boots, his gauntlets

of cracked leather, his gold watch.

"Bye! bye!" he sang, from the window

of the train, his face aglow

with the joy of the adventure.

He was going back to die for good

Tsar Nicholas. The waters of life

are pure, the Tao says, but our river

is salted with blown truck tires,

non-union organizers, dead carp

floating silver side up, and is pulled

by a tide of money, and whatever it

nourishes it turns to pure shit.