Roses are Red, Violets are Blue...

All arts are not created equal.

These days, if you want to be a successful artist, chances are you’ll want to be a visual artist and not a poet. If you happen to make it big as a painter, you might just auction off something for half a million at Sotheby’s or Christie’s. Making it big as a poet means you might sell about 50,000 copies. “And let’s assume the writer makes a dollar a book,” adds Emily K. Vasiliauskas ’07, a poet and one of two Harvard 2007 Marshall Scholarship recipients. Clearly, the audience for poetry isn’t what it used to be.

Yet, despite apathy and lack of appreciation of serious poetry among the general populace, Harvard is home to an unusually large number of aspiring poets, and Harvard graduates stud the canon of star poets.

Those involved in the creative writing community at Harvard agree that they live in a uniquely vibrant, creative and stimulating environment.

STYLES AND INTENTIONS

“There’s certainly a very high concentration of talent [here,]” says Jeff S. Nagy ’07.

Nagy, a former poetry editor of The Harvard Advocate, is a curious poet. Belying his bespectacled and bookish appearance is his insistent manner and his forceful stand on the role of his art.

“Poetry can enrich our speech,” he explains. “It’s a very simple statement, but it’s true. Literature is innovative and not just imitative.”

Yet, he does not harbor grand illusions about poetry revolutionizing the world. “I don’t think poetry should be a vehicle for political or social change,” Nagy says, while acknowledging the fact that it is not necessarily a popular opinion among fellow poets.

Indeed, Nagy’s audience is intentionally small. Although an editor of poetry, he has published only one poem while at Harvard. His poems are usually written for one pair of eyes only, after which they are destroyed, never to be read by another person.

Nagy’s wish for his poems to communicate on a personal level is a goal shared by many of colleagues, albeit in a less extreme fashion.

Vasiliauskas puts it this way: “Personally, even though writing poetry is a private act, there’s always a will for me to communicate.” She is also a former editor-in-chief of The Gamut, the only all-poetry publication on campus, and is a Crimson photo editor.

“I write with the hope of someone reading it and enjoying it and potentially being moved by it,” she says.

ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS

With past poetic giants such as Robert Frost (who never graduated from Harvard), T. S. Eliot ’09, E.E. Cummings ’15, John L. Ashbery ’49, and Adrienne Rich ’51, being a poet at Harvard—or even a student of poetry—can be a daunting task. Yet, instead of being frightened, many Harvard poets today look to their alumni as a source of motivation.

“I think [literary critic] Harold Bloom is responsible for this idea in literary criticism that writers are involved in a Oedipal struggle with their predecessors,” says Vasiliauskas. “I don’t think this is the case for myself and I doubt it’s true for others.

“I think most of us look at the Harvard poetic tradition as something to be inspired by rather than be intimidated by,” she says.

This relaxed attitude may also be the result of drastic changes at Harvard since the time of Frost, Ashbery, and others.

“Those generations of poets, coming from whatever class backgrounds they came from, would often go immediately to a place like Harvard,” says Kevin Holden ’05, an MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the University of Iowa. “So it’s not so much necessarily Harvard as it was them. You couldn’t write poetry as an undergrad for credit as far as I know, until fairly recently.”

Many of the poets arriving at Harvard today come not for the chance to stand among giants but rather to learn the craft of poetry within the system of ‘workshopping.’

“The focus of workshops tends to be more about the quality of the poem rather than the meaning. The goal of workshops is to be able to talk about the poem presented and how to make it better,” says Vasiliauskas.

“You meet once a week, say, for three hours and go through a number of poems,” says Holden of workshopping. “People have read them before and are very prepared to talk about them. People work as a group and make comments and suggestions and do close readings of the poems.”

Most current students and recent graduates agree that the guiding light of the program at Harvard is Pulitzer-winning poet Jorie Graham, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, who brought to Harvard the workshopping system, which was developed at The University of Iowa.

“The atmosphere or the style of the workshops at Harvard are definitely influenced by her,” says Holden.

REACHING OUT

Despite a strong tradition of publishing poetry at Harvard, literary journals such as The Advocate are no longer the only place on campus where students participate in poetry. The spoken-word movement, a combination of performance art, poetry reading, and poetry jam, is rapidly gaining prominence at Harvard, and part of its purpose it to introduce the art of poetry to a wider audience—especially to non-specialists.

“What I like about spoken word is that there is no comp,” says Eleanor M. Boudreau ’07, a spoken-word performer. “Anyone can show up to the meetings and we let anybody read at the open-mikes.”

“If you think that words matter and poetry matters, than it has to matter to everyone, and not just English majors or people who devote all their time to poetry or studying poetry or writing poetry,” she says.

Boudreau, who is writing a collection of poetry for her senior thesis, is no stranger to the more formal and technical aspects of poetry composition. Yet, she says she is especially happy when a physics or math concentrator, who may not completely understand the difference between an iamb and a dactyl, gets the courage to perform an original poem in front of an audience.

“A lot of the poems, people will come up to the mike and say, ‘I just wrote this last night,’ [which] they’ve written all at one go, and when people perform them, you get a sense of the poet behind the poem, and the emotional investment in the poem that I think is very moving,” says Boudreau.

However, poets involved with the more traditional literary publications recognize the lack of dialogue between the two groups. “With the exception of Eleanor [Boudreau], there seems to be a gap between spoken word and written poetry [on campus],” remarks Nagy.

WILL THE NEXT ROBERT FROST PLEASE STAND UP?

Though recent graduates such as Srikanth K. Reddy ’95 and Kevin L. Young ’92 have attained quite a bit of success with their work, it has been a long time since Harvard (and anywhere else in the United States, for that matter) has turned out a marquee name in poetry such as T.S. Eliot. Perhaps the days are over when a poet would be commissioned to write and recite a poem at a Presidential inauguration, as did Robert Frost during the inauguration of John F. Kennedy ’40.

Those involved in the poetry scene recognize the need for audience outreach with activities such as group readings, open-mikes, and the Internet as means of wider dissemination of their work, and there’s almost unanimous agreement that the lack of awareness of poetry in the U.S. is not due to innate human traits—it’s just that our culture and education systems have changed.

“It’s a cultural phenomenon in a sense. There are other countries where people are more aware of poetry, which just seems to have to do with certain cultural values,” says Holden. “For instance…almost anybody in Russia can quote poems. They all know Pushkin poems by heart.”

“I would assert that it’s partly an educational issue” adds Vasiliauskas. “I think what education can do is to cultivate a willingness to slow down and to show that [poetry] is pleasurable.”

However, despite their hopes for the future, many of these poets believe that poetry will never become a part of mass culture.

“Real and deep engagement with poetry will always be something rare. Difficult art will be difficult no matter what the medium is,” says Dan Chaisson, a graduate of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and a widely published poet and professor of English at Wellesley College.

“I would hate for [poetry] to be some market driven industry like fiction or visual art,” he says. “If the market determined who gets to the top, we would lose some of our most valuable poets and the freedom and style along with it.”

“I didn’t ever feel burdened by the past at all at Harvard,” adds Chiasson. “I never felt that, and if anyone ever feels that, just remember all the awful poets that have come out of Harvard over the years. The place felt like it was in a state of high intoxication, and it was very good for me.”

—Crimson staff writer Eric W. Lin can be reached at ericlin@fas.harvard.edu.