First state poetry festival spreads the good muse

Lowell gathering aims to bring art form into everyday culture

Former poet laureate Robert Pinsky promotes the Favorite Poem Project.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth by curmudgeonly pundits over the decline in reading and literature will fade like mist at daybreak this weekend when poets and the public meet in Lowell to celebrate the power of words.

The first Massachusetts Poetry Festival - featuring both major and aspiring poets - aims to bring poetry back into everyday culture by showcasing the breadth of poetic expression in readings, workshops, films, and other events.

Appearing will be former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky, who championed poetry through his nationwide Favorite Poem Project. Pinsky contends that "the Web - perhaps paradoxically - has somewhat restored the vocal nature of poetry."

As he wrote in an e-mail, "At Slate, where I am poetry editor, the weekly poem is presented in audio as well as text. And I know from my e-mail that some readers know poems of mine from YouTube and other sites, rather than from my books or magazine publications."

Take his popular poem "Samurai Song":

When I had no roof I made

Audacity my roof. When I had

No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.

When I had no ears I thought.

When I had no thought I waited . . .

Today you can not only easily find copies of the entire poem online, you can find recordings and videos of Pinsky reciting it.

Other poets attending include Nick Flynn, Rhina Espaillat, Lucie Brock-Broido, Martin Espada, Regie Gibson, X.J. Kennedy, Everett Hoagland, Barbara Helfgott Hyett, Ed Sanders, Richard Hoffman, Ann Killough, and many others.

Workshops for both children and adults from Friday to Sunday will explore aspects of poetry from creating community to writing about current events.

"The festival is a wonderful idea, I welcome it and I feel honored as well as delighted to be taking part in it," Pinsky said in his e-mail.

Pinsky scoffed at the idea that poetry has lost popularity.

"Poetry dead?" he wrote. "An absurd idea, like saying that dancing or singing is dead, or that cuisine as distinct from nutrition is dead, or lovemaking as distinct from procreation. Poetry is fundamental. To take one prominent but often strangely ignored example, the Koran is in poetry - that is part of why people can memorize large parts, or even all of it. Same is true of much of the Hebrew and Hindu sacred texts."

Pinsky cited websites such as favoritepoem.org, frequented by "American lawyers, construction workers, children, salespeople, professors, scientists [who are] reciting and discussing poems by Whitman, Neruda, Keats, etc. These readers do something no actor or rap artist could do, something no poet reading his or her own work, no professor of literature can do: They demonstrate the essential nature of poetry - a poem taking place in the breath of a reader."

Nick Flynn, a Massachusetts native, Brooklyn resident, and prize-winning poet, said he believes that this is "a golden age for poetry in America."

He said there is a huge variety of popular poetry, from the blasts of verbiage in coffee house poetry slams to high school students earnestly writing rhymes, to students poring over classical poetry in college, to the many would-be who scribble into the night on their own.

"There is really good poetry coming out now in America," he said. "There always has been, but it seems like with all the channels now there's a recognition of the power of the poem."

Poetry, he said, is "never going to be as huge as, like, television, but that's its very nature. But there are very few television shows that I would watch twice and there are hundreds of poems I would read over and over again - read every day and get something out of it."

Flynn will read from his work with Espaillat and Gibson on Friday; Pinsky, Brock-Broido, and Espada will read on Saturday. Both events are from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at the Lowell High School Freshman Academy. Tickets are required.

Flynn's poetry is known for its acute images and rough realism. One of his best-known poems is about his mother's suicide, "Bag of Mice":

I dreamt your suicide note

was scrawled in pencil on a brown paperbag,

& in the bag were six baby mice. The bag

opened into darkness,

smoldering

from the top down . . .

Flynn, who teaches at the University of Houston and who was credited as a "field poet" on the documentary film "Darwin's Nightmare" ("I want it to be a union job soon on all films," he joked), researched his upcoming book, "The Ticking is the Bomb," by meeting some of the Iraqis featured in the notorious photos from the Abu Ghraib prison.

Still, Flynn acknowledged, "no one went into poetry to make money; it's outside the economy."