A poet's hail and farewell

Fred Chappell reflects on raising state's poetic consciousness

By FRED CHAPPELL, Correspondent

Farewell. I depart the post of poet laureate of North Carolina with nearly equal feelings of regret and relief. It has been an adventure and one always feels wistful when an adventure ends. But I think many of us share the idea about adventures that they are extraneous to the normal, unadventurous course of life and maybe are even a little ungenuine. Perhaps this feeling is peculiar to a poet whose vocation is by nature solitary and meditative and whose sharpest notion of danger is a risky simile.

My purposes in the office were to make poetry and other literature attractive, to broaden the audience for North Carolina writing, to encourage the arts of reading, teaching and composition, and to instruct by entertaining. My honest best assessment is that I succeeded better than I had hoped and failed more profoundly than I had feared.

My means were modest, but my goals would have been the same if I had been given, as Poetry magazine lately has been given, a bequest of $100 million by Ruth Lilly of the pharmaceuticals family. With that kind of money, one might establish a permanent troupe to give dramatic poetry presentations, the way the North Carolina Touring Theatre so brilliantly presented selections from our Poetry Society's landmark anthology, "Word and Witness." One might found a journal and a book publishing house devoted solely to North Carolina writing. One might videotape and store the principal readings and presentations by authors within our state. A thousand projects might be undertaken, but the results could not be guaranteed. The greatest amount of public notice always would come from that initial moment: "A hundred million bucks for poetry? You gotta be kidding!"

Such skepticism is understandable. Poetry is so much a part of our daily lives that most of us take it for granted. I am speaking of the low-wattage verse that immerses us all: pop song lyrics, greeting cards, inspirational and religious stanzas quoted in sermons and political speeches, hymns, advertising jingles, and so forth.

Poets generally don't think of this stuff as "real poetry," but of course it is. It communicates meanings by means of poetic techniques such as rhyme, meter and metaphor. It satisfies our innate hunger for poetry the way that junk food sates our natural hunger for sturdier fare. It is omnipresent, immediately accessible and cheap. As a clever poet once said, "Who could ask for anything more?"

A few readers do ask for more. A minority desire a kind of poetry with some intellectual complexity, emotional substance and aesthetically pleasing language. The number of them has always been small, and I am certain that my efforts of the past five years have not swollen them into a horde ravenous for the beauties of Wallace Stevens and Ruth Stone. But then, I was not vain enough to hope that I might do so.

I had hoped to make some of my fellow Tar Heels aware of the startling efflorescence of our state's contemporary literature and especially of its poetry. To this end I visited venues of every sort, from kindergartens to postgraduate schools, Kiwanis and Rotary and Optimists clubs, retirement homes, churches, book clubs, libraries, bookstores, civic centers and so forth. You name it and I was there, reading from the work of North Carolina poets from A (Betty Adcock) to Z (Isabel Zuber). I also performed a lot more of my own stuff than I wanted to, sometimes because it was requested, sometimes because I was lazy.

I got a fair amount of feedback, often from the youngest audiences, grammar and middle schools. The N.C. Arts Council, which arranged, facilitated and underwrote most of the expense for this labor, also received responses, and I must hope that these were sufficient to compensate in some measure the strenuous, cheerful efforts of Debbie McGill, Kirsten Mullen and Joe Newberry. My host university, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, also supported my tenure with money for travel and postage and by loosening my academic work schedule. In short, it required a lot of helpful people with warm good will for me to shuffle my travel-worn carcass and ungainly enthusiasm to 250 public engagements.

There was an unexpected duty. I was asked to write occasional poems to mark the anniversaries of institutions, the achievements of individuals, and other notable events and ceremonies. I complied with good will but not always with strong achievement. Some of these poems had to struggle to rise to the level of mediocrity and did not always succeed in doing so. Each time I gave the occasion my best shot but too often it fell short of the target.

Yet I understood that to be asked to write was a recognition of the worth of poetry, an acknowledgement of its ceremonial nature and its power to lend spirit and dignity and perhaps memorability to events that would otherwise remain incompletely adorned. It was not necessary for all the poems to be excellent specimens of the art; sometimes it was not even appropriate. The requirements were that they be apposite, accessible and suitably dignified without being stuffy. I found that forms with meter and rhyme were appreciated, free verse tolerated with a forgiving smile. A few occasions lent themselves to humor, which offered the element of surprise.

Humor and informality of personal approach were my best allies. I soon found that my audiences expected the poetry I presented to be deadly serious if not downright gloomy, fully of metaphysical perplexities and personal tribulation. I think some of them half-expected to undergo a written examination when I concluded. Much of my energy went into dispelling these and other similar superstitions.

I wish I could have killed once and for all, with friendly humor, the fear of poetry. Better to be thought frivolous than pompous, better to be perceived as lightweight than overbearing. I would like to be able to convince my colleagues in the art that the cause of poetry does not advance when the most evident quality of its character is self-importance. It is salubrious to recall that the first duty of Sophocles, Shakespeare and even Milton is to entertain. Poetry that fails to entertain is only bad philosophy or mere personal confession.

What would I do for the cause of poetry if I had Mrs. Lilly's scores of millions? I would give it, in the Sacred Name of Poetry, to urgent concerns like hunger, disease, poverty and possibilities for peace. Then I would scrounge up $60,000 from somewhere else and send four poets around our state, to schools and churches, retirement homes and libraries, to tease, cajole, intrigue and entrap people into making the reading of contemporary poetry a part of their lives.

In short, I would employ modest means to attain modest goals. Modesty is a garment that shows the art of poetry in its most alluring light. If it doesn't disarm, it can never charm. If it doesn't charm, it is not poetry. If it is not poetry, then it is a pointless commodity no one would welcome.

But for five years it has been gratefully and proudly welcomed wherever I could bring news of it. In ancient times the Muses made their home on Mount Helicon. Lately they have often been discovered hanging out, gossiping like chickadees, in North Carolina.