This is the question Atlantic Monthly ponders. "Poetry has vanished as a cultural force in America. If poets venture outside their confined world, they can work to make it essential once more," the story reads.
I'm reminded of reading all that great Beat poetry when I was just out of college. I was trying to woo my beautiful wife and so I'd read, passionately and aloud, the works of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (pictured above).
From "Howl":
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water fiats 'doating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated...
If my whiz bang readings of those effervescent Beats didn't do it, I'd shift gears, read some Emily Dickinson or Rimbaud, some William Stafford or, the ultimate in woman wooing, the works of Pablo Neruda.
Can poetry change the world these days? Perhaps, perhaps not. What it still CAN do, however, is help people fall in love with one another. And, really, that's about as great a change in the world as you can make.
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