Howlin' 'Wulf

By Diann Blakely

"Poetry is the news that stays news,“ Ezra Pound said, reminding us that the greatest poems embody themes as timeless and universal as the love, loss, and longing that have always troubled the human heart. Pound’s dictum obviously applies to poems like ”Ode to a Nightingale“ or The Wasteland: Any present-day reader can identify with John Keats’ secular ecstasy or T.S. Eliot’s religious despair. But what sort of ”news“ does a poem like Beowulf, with its mead-hall monologues and thornily inflected war-whoops, bring us today? Even Seamus Heaney, the Irish bard and Nobel laureate behind the newest translation of the poem from the original Anglo-Saxon (FSG, $25), seems startled that his version of the epic has landed on the New York Times best-seller list.

Heaney’s interest in Beowulf developed relatively late: As a Belfast Catholic schoolboy whose forebears spoke Irish, Heaney felt bitterly estranged from the Anglo-Saxon tongue, a symbol of his homeland’s conquest and partition. His reconciliation of the Irish and English, the Celtic and the Saxon, didn’t begin till much later, when he happened to hear a relative say, ”They’ll just have to learn to thole.“ The poet remembered the word—which means to suffer or endure—from a long-ago, much-despised Anglo-Saxon school course. And since he had begun to teach stateside for one semester each year, he further realized that ”thole“ had not only journeyed from England to Scotland to ”Ulster with the planters and then across from the planters to the locals,“ but also ”farther across again when the Scots Irish emigrated to the American South in the 18th century.“ As evidence, Heaney quotes Nashville’s John Crowe Ransom in his introduction to Beowulf: ”Sweet ladies, long may ye bloom, and though I hope ye may thole.“

In other words, Heaney’s Beowulf translation, which has been lauded by reviewers with every praiseful adjective in the Oxford English Dictionary, bloomed from soil cross-pollinated by Gaelic, Anglo-Saxon, and modern English, especially its current Irish, Scots, and American varieties. The collapsed dualities out of which Heaney writes are no less present in our own country. Indeed, the best American verse collections published since last year’s National Poetry Month have been energized by a lavish variety of tensions: self/world, formalism/free verse, American/English, white/ethnic or racial, academic/”real world.“

A related antiphony results from the conflict between high culture and popular art, which provides not only the subject matter but also the raison d’être of David Lehman’s highly entertaining and generously, wittily eclectic The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry (Scribner, $16). Lehman set himself a creative exercise: write a poem every day chronicling life in New York City, where, he says, ”every street corner seems to promise an adventure.“ The Daily Mirror results from the best of Lehman’s efforts, which seem the love-children of Emily Dickinson and Frank O’Hara.

In addition to teaching, Lehman serves as general editor of the Best American Poetry anthologies. He belongs to the poetry ”establishment,“ but unlike many of its members, he doesn’t shun the influence of the slam/spoken-word movement. ”Maybe I’m more open-minded about slams,“ Lehman says, ”because I’ve gone to them.... Poetry belongs as much in bars and breweries as in classrooms and libraries“; moreover, he adds, ”a poetry event, such as a slam or a performance, can have an effect akin to that of a poetic form: It can stimulate inventiveness.“

That inventiveness is clear in The Daily Mirror. Even as we read the poems on the page, we realize that they ”also ask to be spoken aloud,“ as their author puts the matter. These poems, he adds, ”are talky, they sometimes seem like conversations by other means, and I love reading them aloud, though my own performance style is understated.“

The performance style of Saul Williams, who coscripted and starred in the recent film Slam, is considerably more demonstrative. He appears with Jessica Care Moore, Tish Benson, and six other spoken-word poets in Zoe Anglesey’s Listen Up! (Ballantine/One World, $12.50), a new anthology of spoken-word poetry. Williams shines alongside Moore, a slam ”black belt“ who has won the Showtime at the Apollo talent contest a record-breaking five times.

Anglesey’s excellent introduction makes a compelling case for slam poetry’s place in the African American literary tradition. Langston Hughes, who based his poetry’s diction, rhythms, and forms on blues and jazz, is an obvious forebear, as is Amiri Baraka, whose involvement in both jazz poetry of the ’50s and the Black Arts movement of the ’70s encouraged him to serve as mentor to several of the poets in Anglesey’s anthology.

Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Koumunyakaa—who was in town last week for Vanderbilt’s Millennial Gathering of Writers of the New South—clearly values the work Anglesey collects, having authored the foreword for Listen Up! A ”traditional“ poet whose work pulses with the rhythms of blues and jazz, he sees how slam poetry stands squarely in the middle between mainstream poetry—meant both for the page and the ear—and performance arts, including hip-hop. Thus the criteria for excellence change: Some spoken-word poems ”lie on the page with ease,“ he believes, while ”others can only come alive through the human voice.“