Favorite Poem archive premieres at Library of Congress

By Eric McHenry

Michael Lythgoe reads his favorite poem with a decorous restraint that recalls his years of military service.

Standing, with shoulders squared, before the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., he recites Yusef Komunyakaa's "Facing It." His delivery is solemn and steady.

The poem, in which a veteran describes the reflections he sees in the memorial wall's polished face, concludes with a simple image -- no rhetorical flourish or moment of profound abstraction. But when Lythgoe reaches its last lines, his voice unexpectedly breaks. He can barely get through them: "In the black mirror / a woman's trying to erase names: / No, she's brushing a boy's hair."

The camera lingers on him for a few moments as he recomposes himself and stands in silence. The reflection of the Washington Monument is visible in the black granite behind him.

Lythgoe and 49 other Americans are featured in the Favorite Poem Project audiovisual archive, which Robert Pinsky premiered at the Library of Congress on April 3. It is the project's centerpiece, Pinsky says, because it highlights as no other medium can the personal relationship between a favorite poem and its reader.

"I had not realized, until I saw the videos, that you can see a person experience a poem," says Pinsky, a CAS professor of English, who is currently completing his third and final term as U.S. poet laureate. "You really can't see people experience a movie. You can see them respond to it while they're looking at it, but that's seeing a response. You can see somebody with headphones on, or at a concert, responding to music, but it's not the same as seeing somebody read a poem aloud. You really are witnessing that person's experience of the poem."

Producers D. B. Roderick and Emiko Omori made each participant the subject of a semibiographical short film. The archive includes a construction worker who loves Whitman, an English-born San Franciscan who reads Goethe, and Pov Chin, a 20-year-old Cambodian immigrant whose grandmother and brothers were murdered by the Khmer Rouge. To her, the Langston Hughes poem "Minstrel Man" speaks of the deep sorrow that a superficial smile often obscures.

"The documentaries," says project director Maggie Dietz (GRS'97), "turned out to be a deeper entry than we'd expected, not only into the relationship between person and poem, but into the person's life. I guess the word documentaries represents a new way of thinking about the audiovisual recordings. It's actually the term I've started using since seeing them."

Pinsky presented 10 of the documentaries at the April 3 Library of Congress event, which inaugurated a two-day conference called Poetry in America: A Library of Congress Bicentennial Celebration. Along with bicentennial consultant poets Rita Dove, Louise Glück, and W. S. Merwin, he also read a favorite poem.

Initially, Pinsky had envisioned the project as a small collection of recordings he could donate to the Library of Congress at the end of his tenure. It swiftly grew, however, into something much larger, both conceptually and popularly. Between April 1998 and April 1999, his office received over 18,000 applications to read poems. In addition to the audiovisual archive and a separate collection of audio recordings, the project has yielded a print anthology, a Web site, and an ongoing series of favorite poem readings at schools, libraries, and Centers for the Book throughout the country.

The project is aggressively democratic in spirit, with contributions from Americans of every demographic group and social stripe, including President Clinton and the First Lady. To make it even more broadly representative, Pinsky plans to add another 50 short films to the archive. Those in the current collection were all shot in major cities on the East and West coasts. "We hope to have another round of production," he says. "We want to be able to do the South and the Midwest."

Pinsky adds that he'll continue working on the project "even after I add 'former' to my name.

"And I'm happy to say that Maggie Dietz is going to stay on as project director for me," he says. "Aside from the next round of production, we also have to get these into schools and libraries and into as many formats as we can. I think they'll be extremely useful in the teaching of poetry."

The Favorite Poem Project is a collaborative partnership between Boston University, the Library of Congress, and the New England Foundation for the Arts. For more information, visit www.favoritepoem.org.

 


Poetic declarations of interdependence
In "Biography," an only obliquely biographical poem from his new collection Jersey Rain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), Robert Pinsky writes that his soul "cleaves to circles."

And indeed, throughout the poem and book, Pinsky seems interested in the particulars of his own life only inasmuch as they place that life in some larger sphere or cycle: "my circle of friends, / The art of lines, chord of the circle of work. / Radius. Lives of children growing away, / The plant radiant in air, its root in dark."

Even in the highly personal prose poem "Alphabet of My Dead," uncharacteristic both because it is so personal and because it is prose, his concern isn't really with the details, but with the "great wheel turned by the engine of death, always churning . . ."
Jersey Rain book cover

This wheel is not a new presence in his poetry, but Pinsky is constantly reinventing it. Unlike "The Figured Wheel," the title poem of his 1996 collection, whose subject "mills everything alive and grinds / The remains of the dead," most of the poems in Jersey Rain are concerned with the interdependence of smaller cogs: "Stone wheel that sharpens the blade that mows the grain, / Wheel of the sunflower turning, wheel that turns / The spiral press that squeezes the oil expressed / From shale or olives."

Machines are another old fascination Pinsky revisits with fresh attention in the book. He devotes many lines to the idea that every human endeavor, every computer and musical instrument and museum, is a product of the entire history of human endeavor.

"The book is in some ways guided by that idea," Pinsky says.

He makes use of some new exponents, too, such as the Greek god Hermes and the alphabet. Three poems in the collection, including "Alphabet of My Dead," feature some sort of progression through the 26 letters.

Pinsky's search for the right symbols may have him straddling epochs -- the wheel, the Roman alphabet, a Greek god, an "Ode to Television" -- but the result is somehow unified, less a grab bag than a machinist's chest. Each tool, distinct in appearance and function, serves a common end.

"In a way, Hermes is the god of tinkerers," Pinsky says. "He invented a musical instrument by stringing the tortoise shell. Even his getup -- the winged helmet and winged shoes -- has a kind of Wright brothers, industrial revolution cleverness about it. And I think writing a poem with a word for each letter of the alphabet, or a poem that retains the same consonant rhyme throughout, is very much a tinkerer's way to proceed. It's in the spirit of machinery."