“For hours, I sat there, mocked by the bees— / silly girl, their golden faces laughed, she still wants / and wants.” — Aria Aber, “Dirt and Light”
It’s the middle of April, the sundresses are out, and no one is indoors. On a Wednesday evening, I descend into the lowest floor of HQ for an event run by The Yale Review Spring Festival, expecting a crowd, and end up slipping into the side of a mostly empty row. At the podium stands a pantheon of my personal poetic idols—Aria Aber, Brenda Shaugnessy, Catherine Barnett. Barely anyone is here to witness them.
So much of poetry’s work seems to happen this way: behind closed doors, in sparsely populated auditoriums with dim overhead lighting. The audience, always a smattering of academics, other invited writers, and aspiring student-poets, remain undeterred by the soothsayers of slim literary futures.
The reading goes well. Aber reads some unpublished pieces, one titled “Bildungsroman,” another about the work of translation, another a series of public elegies written for a late friend. I love her work. She is the reason I have found myself in this dark, lullaby-like cradle of verse. She is a poet who is unapologetically well-read and unapologetically indebted to her poetic forebears, always speaking alongside Merrill and Rilke. In this HQ classroom, she is exactly who I envisioned from my endless trawling of her various online presences: effortlessly cool, talented, as close to a literary it-girl as a poet can be. Barnett and Shaughnessy too are compelling, offering up ars poeticas, ekphrastic pieces on Dadaist art pieces, and stories of chance encounters with strangers at parties. Each poem is met with resounding softness—hushed whispers, the slight shifting of feet.
The panel that follows unfolds like all others: under the poetic pretense of humility and respectability. At the moderator’s behest, the poets assemble across a table in a careful staging of lyrical discourse. They are incessantly cordial and generous to one another for our audience of thirty, piggy-backing off of each other’s points in a Platonic example of a Socratic seminar. A prescient question is asked: is lyric itself a social force in shaping reality? The three poets make poignant statements about the social power of the lyric, its capacity for resistance.
A few hundred feet outside the auditorium’s doors, Beinecke Plaza blooms with verse.
I have wanted to become a poet for years. In pursuit of this want, I’ve sat through reading after reading, taken trains, skipped classes, stared at Zoom screens in Hong Kong twilights, just to hear poets look down at their freshly-published chapbooks, drawing the same, lilted cadence from their lips. There is nothing that unites the nation of page poets more than Poet Voice: the accent, the intonation, that coheres all thousands of styles and speakers into one. I am well-versed in the signature cadence of a poetry reading, the soft, down-turned slur, the choked pauses at line breaks, the verse draped in extra-enunciated sighs—flattening invocations of desire until they all barrel toward the same low note.
My pilgrimages to these events seemed to lead me to the most glaring instances of the hermetic inutility of the lyric—and worse, the wonderful fact that nobody really cares that much about poetry. As it turns out, most people don’t have enough time to spare for the ritual of snapping at a well-balanced line break.
Poetry, as both Aber and Barnett mentioned during the panel, is an art form that lives opposite to capital. But often, it seems like poetry has lived opposite to any meaningful collective audience at all. Even if there were bodies that filled the room, I found myself confused by the purpose of poetry readings—their lack of gravity anywhere other than a review in a student newspaper or small literary magazine. An overquoted line from Auden laments that poetry makes nothing happen. And what exactly is all this soft, breathy reading in service of? Why not simply pick up a book? Is poetry condemned to remain a private, solitary experience?
I began to leave cafés and lecture halls increasingly confused and empty. Over time, my attendance at readings took on a certain blankness—the poets and their utterances exist in a vacuum that refuses to take root outdoors. I’m forced to wonder again: is lyric itself a social force in shaping reality? What, if anything, does the lyric do beyond the walls of panels and Yale Review festival readings?
Outside HQ L02, it has been a week steeped in the lyric. On Monday, Natalie Diaz stood on Beinecke Plaza while reading poems from Rifqa, a collection by the Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd. Minutes later, senior student poets conducting a reading inside the Beinecke Library called upon the audience to join the occupation of Beinecke. For the past few weeks, end rhyme has pierced through campus, permeating the walls of the Schwarzmann Center.
Poetry, when unleashed from the page and into the public arena of protest, has become more than just one solitude speaking to another. In Aber’s words, poetry supersedes the impossibility of communicating with another. The teething rhyme of chants and public readings that have resounded across campus embeds a collective imagined future, one that cannot be articulated by the constraints of prosaic language.
There is, as Aria put it, a sea of potential energy in the soft subterranean-ness of verse. As a literary form that is fundamentally unlucrative, poetry earns its own freedom.
I do not wish to deride the Festival panel. It was intended as an event by writers, for writers, so perhaps it warranted its own quiet insularity. But it is important to ward against the institutional bulwarks of poetry that deign to keep it on a lifeline of meager profitability. The current state of the lyric cannot be defined by organizations that, so often, breed token representatives of marginalized communities and designate them spokespeople for a narrow audience of MFA grads. This is not how poetry stays alive.
Instead, it “survives, / A way happening, a mouth.” Here is the discarded end to Auden’s lamentation: poetry might not make, but it remains in the landscape that surrounds us—flowing through the “raw towns that we believe and die in.” Above the HQ basement, Cross Campus swells with sleeping bags, picnic blankets; the pavement flowering with chalked art and verse and vows of support. Here is the strongest invocation for the necessity of public poetry: it is time to revive the lyric by bringing it back into the world. It is time for the lyric to take the streets again.
