Colin McEnroe Show: Poetry, Politics & (Bully) Pulpits
How can language and power influence political opinion?
Published: Apr 11, 2011
Slideshow
Dana Gioia
Photo:Chion Wolf
Vincent Moscardelli
Photo:Chion Wolf
Audio Playlist
Colin McEnroe Show: Poetry, Politics & (Bully) Pulpits
Today's show is in two segments. One is about the "bully pulpit," that notion that the presidency provides a natural soap box that enables the president to alter the national mood and frame the way we think. The other part of the show is a conversation with a poet and former head of the NEA. One of his books is called Can Poetry Matter?
Of course, the two ideas are linked. If President Obama has lost the inherent advantage of the bully pulpit, it's at least partly because he has lost control of his own poetry.
As Connecticut's own Elizabeth Alexander said on the day of Obama's inauguration:
We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.
She ended
In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,
praise song for walking forward in that light.
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Bully pupit
Two thoughts. There was a sense that Obama's speech after the shooting in Phoenix was perhaps the speech that he's made which, for a few days at least, had the effect of uniting the country. On the other hand, one thing that prevents Obama in particular to use a "bully pulpit" is the section of this country which has embraced the most negative myths about who he is, and those myths (he was born in Kenya; he's a Muslim who hates this country, etc.) and the way this is spread so thoroughly because of the Internet. This bias against him makes it nearly impossible for him to effectively reach this sector of this country, regardless of what rhetoric he uses.
E-mail from Thomas
It's unfortunate that during a discussion of working poets, one of the most famous of them was not mentioned, Charles Bukowski. I generally shy away from the term "elitist", but I can think of no better term for the short shrift that he gets, especially in the context of poets that needed to have a job. The other "working" poets that were mentioned were white collar. If they didn't work, they still ate.
I don't even care for the majority of Bukowski's poems, but there seems to be a literary elitism that discounts a blue collar, semi-educated vagabond who saw the beauty and ugliness in everyday life and felt compelled to put it in verse. As relating to his poetry and personality, yes, Bukowski was crude, a lecher, an alcoholic, a gambler, etc...but the same people who cite these traits often make exceptions for others; some with far worse flaws - Whitman, Thomas, Borroughs, and Ginsburg immediately come to mind.
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