In 1928, Herbert Hoover won on the slogan, "A Chicken in Every Pot." So what if the Depression destroyed his presidency, making pots and chickens into endangered species? We're talking slogans, and the value of such succinct statements is their ability, like peanut butter for the psyche, to stick to the roof of the mind.
I'm a fifth-generation Californian, and I'm tossing my hat into the ring (along with the state's million or so other poets) to become California's second poet laureate, a no-pay position appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state Senate. (No pay is fine with me, and I don't wear a hat, so I haven't ventured anything yet.) My slogan?: A Poet in Every Paper.
William Carlos Williams wrote, famously, in "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower":
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
But in other countries -- all through the Spanish-speaking world, for instance -- poetry is the news, and poets labor daily in service of making their countrymen and -women think, question, debate.
My wife, the poet Kaaren Kitchell, and I volunteer for "Poetry in Motion," the Metropolitan Transit Authority project that puts poets at bus stops and on subway cars all over Los Angeles every Friday in April. We are clad in orange safety vests and armed solely with poetry, not necessarily our own.
Each year we relearn that our Spanish-speaking L.A. neighbors -- like the women who queue politely atWilshire and Westwood waiting for the second or third bus they've ridden that morning to whisk them to the Westside -- can recite to us, from memory, in their native tongue, the poets we read to them in English -- Neruda, Machado, Zamora, Paz. A street-corner reading becomes a communal reunion, as those raised on poetry find common ground with the eager poets, far fewer in number, who have come to offer them culture. (Oh, irony, here is thy sting.)
It's time to raise all Californians on poetry. My platform is simple. I ask every media outlet in the state to incorporate poetry into its publications, its broadcasts, its websites. Try it and see how your audience reacts. No coercion, no state mandate, just a simple request to present the slant on truth (to twist Emily Dickinson's phrase) that poets bring.
