Mary Swander, a renowned poet and professor of English at Iowa State University gave the following keynote address in celebration of Humanities Iowa Day in March of 2000.

The Importance of Poetry in Everyday Life

By Mary Swander

It was a cold, blustery late March evening, with just enough of a hint of spring in the air to turn the melting snow to slushy patches of ice. I was getting over a bad case of the flu and battling a lingering cough that sent me into spasms of hacking and sputtering. From Ames, Iowa, I was driving up 1-35 to Clear Lake to lead a discussion of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry at the Public Library. I'd had a busy teaching day and the hour and half drive seemed never-ending. I kept pulling into rest stops to swig from my bottle of cough syrup. Would I make it through this night? I wondered.

When I arrived at the library, five or six women in their sixties and seventies gathered around a table in the basement. The women seemed reserved, lifeless. Maybe someone was paying them to be here, too, I thought. After brief introductions by the librarian, I set up the VCR and showed a video of Elizabeth Bishop's life. There were shots of her childhood in Maine, the ocean crashing and hammering the craggy, rugged Maine shoreline. There were shots of her life in Brazil, the majesty of her house, the flora and fauna of the rainforests, the brightly- colored exotic birds perching in the dew-covered trees.

I glanced out at my class. They watched politely, expressionless. One woman in a pale blue dress closed her eyes, appearing to doze. This is going to be a long night, I thought, taking another gulp from my bottle. The video came to an end. I lectured for about ten minutes on Bishop's style, the reaction of critics to her work, her place in American poetry. Now, two more women were beginning to nod off. I passed out some Xeroxed copies of several of Bishop's poems. We read through them. Then in hoarse and strained voice, I began reciting Bishop's villanelle, "The One Art."

The poem begins quietly, speaking of loss in an oblique, almost off hand way. Next, the poet writes of the fluster of losing common place things like her keys and how we accept these moments into our everyday lives. As we age, loss accelerates. Tangible sentimental things, like your mother's watch or a house are harder to lose, but still can be managed, especially compared to losing cities, rivers, whole continents. In the final, ironic stanza, the poet maintains her tone of dismissal of loss. At the same time, she has to almost force herself to confront the overwhelming feelings of grief she experienced at the loss of a loved one.

There was a long silence after my reading.

"All right," I finally said. "Let's just go around the table and get a little reader response. Tell me what your emotions were, what was going through your head when I recited this poem." I called on the woman in the blue dress, trying to wake her up.

"Well, this poem made me mad," she said.

That's a weird response. Sad, maybe, but mad? "This poem made you angry?" I said.

"Madder than tar," the woman said, her voice rising a few decibels.

"Could you tell me more about that?"

"Yes. " She leaned forward on the table. "This poem completely captures what it means to grieve. I lost my husband last year after fifty years of marriage and I was sent all sorts of greeting cards and condolences and nothing, nothing, says it the way this poem does."

"I understand," I said. "I'm sorry to hear about your husband. But you said that the poem made you angry...

"That's right," the blue dress said. "I'm mad, just livid that no one, no teacher or preacher or anyone showed me these beautiful poems before. I'm seventy years old and I've gone all my life without knowing Elizabeth Bishop. That makes me mad! And what's more, you didn't need to show us that video. I can imagine all those scenes from the poems themselves. I just shut my eyes when that film came on. I didn't want it to interfere with what I'd already created in my own head."

Immediately, the class broke into a lively and vigorous discussion of the poems themselves. They related the verse to their own lives, their families, their work on the farm in Iowa---so far removed from Bishop's worlds--but so close to common human experience. Our conversation dashed from one poem to another, trying to discover as much as we could in the short time we had. The librarian even rushed out and hunted through the stacks for the very issue of the National Geographic magazine that Bishop mentions in "The Waiting Room." Although not schooled in some of the more formal aspects of the poetry and criticism, these readers were right on target with their genuine, down-to-earth, direct and intelligent responses to the work.

On the drive home, I thought about how wrong I'd been on the journey up to Clear Lake, how after all these years of reading and writing poetry, I could still underestimate its value in the lives of every day people. Sometimes, I think that we, the reading public, so often hear that adage that no one really cares about poetry that we begin to believe it ourselves. And while I do think it takes some serious study to be able to appreciate all the nuances and allusions of a complicated text, it is good to remind myself, that a group of farm women in northern Iowa can nail the heart and basic meaning of a poem just as well as the most schooled critics.

The woman in the blue dress found a poem on a plain, Xeroxed piece of paper that comforted her in a way, that brought her emotional solace in a form that no commercial product could. While driving south, I remembered another incident from years before in Burlington, Iowa, that startled me into a different awareness of the importance of poetry in every day life. This time in the life of a ten year old girl.

I was teaching in the Artist-in-the-Schools program through the Iowa Arts Council in the early 1980s, spending a week's residency in Burlington. I came into a fourth grade class as I had so many times that year with a worn copy of Howard Norman's translation of the Swampy Cree Indian trickster tales called the Wishing Bone Cycle. The poems are short and lively.

The students in Burlington readily understood the sense of play the poem engendered. Like the farm women, the fourth graders could instantly engage their imaginations, picturing the scene of a crow outside in a tree making a huge racket with a frustrated father inside trying to rock his baby to sleep. Many of the students had younger brothers and sisters and could relate to the event from their own experiences. Did the fourth graders understand the deeper meaning of the metaphor of the crow noises and why the innocent daughter wasn't ready for them yet? Of course not. And I didn't attempt to explain. We were working on the language level of poetry and enjoying the magic of what words could do.

The fourth graders jumped right into writing poems of direct address of their own. They wrote poems to their dogs, cats, goldfish, to bicycles, sneakers, and school lockers. They waved their hands in the air, longing to be the first to come up in front of the class and read their creations out loud.

A girl in pigtails fixed her gaze on me, her deep brown eyes intense and focused.

I called on her to be first.

She stepped up to the front of the classroom and began to read. The rest of the class let out a gasp. I couldn't figure out what was happening. I glanced to the back of the room at the regular classroom teacher but she just stood there, her eyes wide.

The girl in pigtails read her poem in a clear, strong voice. The whole class hung on her every word. When she finished, the students burst into applause. I clapped along with the rest but didn't grasp the significance of the moment until the class was over and the teacher pulled me aside and said, "Do you know that that girl in pigtails has never, ever in her life talked in class, never opened her mouth? We didn't know if she was autistic or what. Now you come in and read poetry and she jumps up and volunteers to read in front of everyone!"

Again, the power of poetry amazed me. There was something so commanding, so alluring in the language of the poetry of Native Americans with their oral tradition that stirred this young girl who had never articulated a sound to speak. Here was a girl who spoke her first words in class inspired by a poem that said, "Sit down and shut up." Surely, there had to be something more at work than just word fun and games. Just as Elizabeth Bishop gave voice to the emotions of the farm women, the Swampy Cree allowed a silent girl to find her own voice. People connected across cultures from Iowa to Brazil, from Burlington to Lake Winnipeg. People found in poetry a means of expression that had never been presented to them before. Their lives changed.

So what good is poetry? It doesn't make money. No, but what good is money in comforting the grief of a bereft widow or overcoming the deep fear of a traumatized child? Historically, poetry, the mother of all other literary genres, has had more basic roles. In the Middle Ages, poetry was song, the music sung by the troubadours who wandered the countryside strumming their lutes and spreading the news of the land. Poetry had rhyme and rhythm and was easy to remember. Poetry lent itself to conveying the great romances of courtly love. Poetry lent itself to dance and other art forms, to ballads that retold the common dramas of the common folk. Poetry cut through class, gender, and race barriers. Every culture has its chants, its litanies that re-enforce ritual, that create forms of worship, that shape custom and culture. While poetry connects people across cultures, it also provides the glue within a culture.

In her collection of essays entitled Why History Matters, the historian Gerda Lerner writes of her separation from her sister during the Holocaust in Europe. The Lerners were from an assimilated, Jewish family in Vienna. Life was safe, secure, until the Nazis swept through Austria. The Lerners were separated and forced to flee for their lives. Cerda made it to America where she painstakingly learned English in hopes of becoming a writer. Her sister fled to Great Britain where she too soon learned the language and took up a new life.

In the 1950s, the two Lerner sisters were at long last reunited. But the meeting was strained. Now the women were coming together from two different continents, two different cultures, two different identities. They spoke to each other in English, their mutual adopted language, but their dialects were very different and didn't serve to strengthen their bond. They parted with an uneasy feeling but vowed to see each other again.

In a couple of years, they made another attempt to spend time with each other. This time, the tension was worse than before. Finally, one night as they were standing at the kitchen sink doing the dishes, one broke out in the nursery songs of their childhood. The other joined in. They sang their common poetry in German and the language and lyrics of that moment rekindled a bond that they hadn't been able to otherwise find in plain speech. Since that time, the two sisters spoken German, their first and native language, whenever they have reunited and their relationship has vastly improved.

Poetry is humankind's first native language. Once the printing press was invented in 1440 and words could be recorded, poetry no longer carried the news of the day. Longer forms like the novel and the memoir could be developed and reproduced. Drama could be written down, actors no longer needing the aid of poetry to help them remember their lines. Now we have the internet, fax machines, cell phones, and CNN to carry our news, deliver our messages, and link together our diverse culture. Old fashioned storytelling has been replaced by television and film.

But the element of poetry that will never be replaced by the media remains: the ability to capture emotion, thought or idea with a primitive, spooky, chill-up-your-spine force. The great German medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen thought real spirituality rested in the creative moment when art was born. A poet, composer, painter, musician, Hildegard made art the transforming center of her life. On a day to day level, it made life worth living. On a mystical level, it brought her in contact with a power of a higher realm. What mattered for Hildegard was the act of creation. Poetry led her to her visions, the painting of her mandalas that illustrate her depiction of the cosmos: all things in one and one in all.

Today, our vision of the world is all too easily reduced to the mundane. Another trip to the mall accomplished on the way home from work, another child carted to soccer practice. The practice of poetry allows those small moments to resonate in a larger way to create a more encompassing view of existence. Elizabeth Bishop's "The Waiting Room," captures a young girl's trip to the dentist with her aunt. We see the ordinary dentist's office. We hear the aunt's expected moan in pain. Yet the portrait of a girl reading the National Geographic magazine while she waits transports us to another continent, into the world of adventure and imagination.

While few of us may have the cosmic vision of Hildegard, while few of us may be reunited with a sibling after living through a holocaust, we can widen our world by recognizing and embracing our own poetic moments. Buddhists call this practice mindfulness. Staying in and appreciating the beauty of the here and now, and allowing the present to remind us of the greater mysteries of the universe. What scares most people about poetry is abstraction. The most common public misconception is that poetry is written in obscure language about an obscure subject to convey esoteric ideas that will never be grasped by regular people. Great poetry does the opposite. It begins with the specific, concrete incident or idea to make the leap toward a shared truth.

Please don't let me leave you with the idea that poetry is just a feel-good exercise that might come in handy in a crisis. Poetry is revolutionary. Poetry is electric. After all, why hadn't the farm woman in Clear Lake heard of Elizabeth Bishop? What hadn't the girl in Burlington been able to speak in class? I don't pretend to know the circumstances behind those two women's lives, but historically women, especially rural women, have been denied the educational privileges of men. Historically, women have been discouraged from finding their voices, expressing themselves in the classroom, speaking up anywhere, lest they appear smarter than men. For the woman in the blue dress and the girl in pigtails poetry was emancipating.

It wasn't until the latter half of the twentieth century that women, people of color, people of various sexual orientations and the disabled were finally allowed to find their voices. In poetry or elsewhere. Poetry has become a road to self-actualization for many individuals, many groups. I think of voices like those of Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Ray Young Bear, Ray Gonzalez, and Li-Young Lee that may have been lost or silenced in previous eras. With the dawning of the new millennium, we're living in an age with one foot firmly planted in the land of social constraints, prejudice and scapegoating, and one foot moving through the door of higher consciousness. Let's let poetry keep pushing us forward.