The other day I opened my appointment book to March to note the due date for a set of library borrowings and saw that I had written in the margin “poetry coupon.” The phrase puzzled me. 

It should be noted here that a tendency toward perfectionism manifests itself oddly in me I can paw through a basket of clean laundry for just what I need for days without folding the stuff and putting it away, but reminder notes have to be in complete sentences with modifying clauses, and if the crosses on the ts don’t look right I’ll erase and begin again. On the advice of my therapist, I am trying to learn to write a two-word phrase like “poetry coupon” and let it go.

The problem, of course, is that when I return to the note, I don’t remember what it means. Does this indicate that the Giant is offering poems in a “buy one, get one free” special? Maybe this is an introductory 25% off deal at, say, “Poems R Us -- Sonnets Rhymed and Metered While You Wait.”

Tonight it hit me -- it is a 10% deal for any order before April 15 from the Spring Church Book Company catalog, made available to me as a participant in Peter Murphy’s Winter Poetry Getaway in Cape May. And the reason I was able to make the connection tonight is that I attended a lecture by the founder and operator of the Spring Church Book Company, poet Edwin Ochester of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Dr. Ochester spoke tonight at Lebanon Valley College, a Methodist-related liberal arts institution in Annville, Pennsylvania, about twenty miles from where I live. As part of their “What’s Next” series, his lecture tonight was about the future of poetry. 

Dr. Ochester teaches poetry courses (both writing and criticism) at the University of
Pittsburgh. He is the author of ten books of poetry, the most recent of which is Allegheny. His poems have appeared in many highly-regarded journals, including Poetry and Ploughshares. He’s won a Pushcart Prize and a number of fellowships. He is the Editor of the Pitt Poetry Series and General Editor of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for short fiction.

He was introduced by an LVC faculty member who has known him since graduate school. He was dressed casually -- plaid shirt buttoned over a tan turtleneck and gold corduroy slacks. He had thinning red hair that flopped over his forehead and grazed the top of his thick bifocals. He reminded me of John Updike, especially in his somewhat unattractive yellow teeth, except Updike always wears a tweed jacket.

Poetry, Ochester said, has always been the stepchild of the arts in the United States, even though it is the oldest of the arts in any tradition. It is generally perceived as irrelevant to ordinary lives and the province of the elite. There is no one poet alive now in the United States, he said, who is a “crossover" poet, that is, one who is known in wide circles beyond the academy. Maya Angelou, for example, has always been most known for her nonfiction, but became “hot” as a poet only after she spoke at Bill Clinton’s first inaugural, an event which was seen live by every English class in the school where I taught. Robert Frost became our “national poet” only in his old age, when he read at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration and received his largest audience ever through television.

Maybe, Ochester suggested, we don’t need a national poet, one who is white, male, from the Northeast, and associated with the upper middle class and the elite university -- a good description of Robert Lowell, who was the last poet to be featured on the cover of Time. (I don’t have a date for that, but I know Lowell died in 1977 and his most controversial book, Life Stories, one of the first in the genre of “confessional poems,” came out in 1959.) We need diversity in our celebrated poets to reflect the diversity in our population. But although women, Latinos, blacks, Asians, and those outside universities are being published, you’ll find that change in this regard is slow, especially if you look at the lists at the traditional houses such as Knopf and Farrar-Strauss.

There has been an explosion in numbers not only of poetry writers, but of poetry readers. Pitt has 300 students majoring in writing (all kinds of writing, not just poetry), but only 80 literature majors. Learning the craft of writing a genre is another way of studying the literature of that genre. Literature majors do not necessarily become lifelong readers, but those who study writing as a craft generally do. (I can attest to this by recalling the assignment sheets and supplemental critical reading suggestions of teaching colleagues who didn’t list anything that wasn’t published after they finished their course work.)

Of the poetry being written today, Ochester said we are returning to more accessible works. There used to be a cult of high modernism -- that is, if the work were particularly difficult, then it was g-o-o-d. Disenchantment has set in with works obscure in meaning or which use language as an ornament instead of as a tool. Now in poetry it is acceptable to use the language of the family, the language of the workplace, or the language of the street -- simple language to convey complex ideas.

As a working poet, I believe that what we need is not just people who read poetry, but those who will buy it as well. Ochester said that the United States has the lowest per capita rate of poetry purchase of any country in the literate world. Fortunately, poetry sales are increasing -- Knopf sold 250,000 copies of poetry titles in 1998. There are a million copies in print of the work of Charles Bukowski (1920-1994 -- a cult figure not unlike Jack Kerouac). British poet Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters (emotionally difficult poems about his marriage to poet Sylvia Plath) has sold very well. Most poetry sales, however, are accomplished by the poets themselves, who cart their work around in milk crates and offer it at the back of the room at readings.

The World Wide Web has been a positive development for poetry readers and writers. The local independent bookseller could never really support poetry beyond that of the well-known university teachers and the hometown poet. They just could not allocate the space and the funds to a wide range of poetry titles. On-line booksellers such as Amazon.com are a boon to poetry because, although the audience is real, the members have always been scattered.

Ochester concluded his talk with a bit of reading from his own work. One line I remember concerned those of us traveling through midlife who are “faithful to our scars.” He also read a translation he did of a poem by Bertold Brecht, about an abortion which took place in the 1920s, “On the Infanticide” -- “Don’t be angry at her -- each creature needs the help of every other.”

The Spring Church Book Company to which I referred earlier is a project begun by
Ochester and his wife twenty-five years ago. It’s a mail-order catalog with absolutely no aesthetic appeal -- five sheets printed on both sides with single-spaced typewritten lists of poetry titles, offered at very reasonable prices, with free postage for orders over $40 and only $2.50 postage for other orders. That beats Amazon for sure.

You can send for a catalog to The Spring Church Book Company, P.O. Box 127, Spring Church, PA 15686, or call 1-800-496-1262. (The Silken Tent receives absolutely no consideration for this publicity!)

To get a daily jolt of poetry for the cost of your ISP minutes, try The Atlantic Monthly’s Poetry Pages or Today’s Poem.

Reading poetry and writing it have become an important component of my devotional life. Poetry can take me more quickly and more directly into that still spot where spirit can be heard than can fiction. I don’t expect ever to make a name as a poet, but poetry will help me make what name I will as a writer.