What is it about poetry? Why at the most extreme moments of our lives do we reach out to it? I think, for example, of a reading I did just two days after the attack on the World Trade Center. I wondered if anyone would come out. They did, in surprisingly large numbers. There was a crowd, fragile and subdued, instinctively searching for a comfort they sensed poetry could offer.
Why does poetry have the power to lift us, enlighten us and, yes, comfort us? I mulled over this question with Katia Kapovich and Philip Nikolayev. Poets originally from the former Soviet Union, they now live in Cambridge and, together, edit Fulcrum, a journal of English language poetry from around the world. Their most recent poetry collections are Nikolayev’s Monkey Time and Kapovich’s Gogol in Rome.
To Kapovich, poetry’s power to offer inspiration or solace lies in our actual need for it. She sees poetry as physically necessary to human life, deserving of its own tier on the nutritional pyramid.
“We need a refined version of what we call speech,” she says. “Our brains are in need of some kind of verbalized music. It is something physical like serotonin. We are supposed to have it and sometimes we are not able to produce it for ourselves.”
Well, yes, poetry does feel like an organic need with its roots in spoken, rather than written, language. I picture generations of people sitting around fires, telling each other stories not in everyday speech, but in a form with a particular sound and way of meaning. And what burns itself into our brains is not only the words, but the spaces between them.
Says Kapovich, “It’s like medicine. Our sick spirits are cured by the divine power of poetry. It needs to be a very high quality of poetry. It only helps when it is very good–like something approved by the FDA. Poets can tell good poetry from bad. They know it immediately. With poetry I don’t like, it makes me silent. When it’s good, I’m ready to scream, to be passionate. Critics need time and distance to tell. Poets know it viscerally.”
Nikolayev differs. “No, not viscerally. They know it from a lifetime of reading poetry, practicing.”
Maybe it’s the atmosphere of Kapovich’s and Nikolayev’s book-crammed apartment, maybe it’s the influence of being witness to their intense discussion, or maybe it’s just the pleasure of being in a place where poetry matters so much. Whatever the reason, I am nudged by a sense that poetry is closer to the core of one’s life for Russians than for most Americans. Kapovich and Nikolayev agree that Russians and Americans approach poetry differently. To begin with, Russian poets simply tend to write fewer poems than American poets. And their subjects differ.
“American poetry is more self-referential, Nikolayev says. “Russian poetry is more dramatic, about love and death.”
“The American poet’s goal is different, to sing the beauty in the trivial, to make it accessible,” says Kapovich. “American poets write more about life. The Russian poet wants to write the one magic poem where all your experience, all the music you carry in your heart is compressed like a spring ready to jump out. A totalitarian regime helps compress the spring by repression of every human thought. Freedom can be like a prison. It paralyzes poets. We need the opposition.”
Nikolayev nods. “Totalitarianism does wonders for poetry,” he says drily, adding “The Russian poets feel that to write a great poem is more important than to live another day.”
Which brings us back to poetry’s physical hold on us.
“At the last minute of your life, Kapovich says, “to write this kind of divine thing, this orphic poem, with rats following the flute silently, obediently.”