A daily dose of poetry

When poet Billy Collins talks of people who "tie a poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it," you’d think he’s denouncing Slobodan Milosevic’s thugs.

But really, the point he makes in his piece Introduction to Poetry is that poetry is not supposed to make life difficult for us. Instead, it should help us see life, and yes, living, in myriad, if not exhilarating, ways.

Our busy lifestyles, however, keep us from really seeing and living. We’ve become too preoccupied with having a life in this technology-driven age that we don’t anymore have time for poetry, if we at all still get enthralled by the magic of words.

Worse, even poetry itself has ceased to be life-giving, having become the exclusive reserve of a cabal of high priests who squirm in ecstasy at the thought that they and only they have been given the key to the mystery of the Logos.

Our poet – recently appointed by the US Library of Congress the new American national poet laureate, replacing the nonagenarian poetry legend Stanley Kunitz – says that even his own students (he’s an English professor at a New York college), unable to see a poem for what it’s worth, resort to beating one with a hose just "to find out what it really means."

Talk about water cure of a different kind.

But how do we fight this animalistic urge to beat a poem to a pulp when its meaning eludes us? A website of contemporary poetry tells us to read a new poem each day to keep a fresh perspective on things. In fact, snatches of Collin’s poem quoted above prefaces the homepage of the site, appropriately named poetrydaily. (By the way, if you want to read more poetry by new US poet laureate Billy Collins, check out www.bigsnap.com/linklibrary.html.)

A friend of mine introduced me to poetrydaily two years ago; I’ve been hooked to the daily habit since then. Thanks to the Internet, you can have a poem daily delivered to the privacy of your mail box, absolutely free, courtesy of the website, www.poems.com.

It has an archive of poets featured in the site and their poems, and carries a section of news about poetry, including links to literary columns in newspapers like the New York Times, The Washington Post and The Irish Times. The featured poet section also has links to the sites of sponsoring institutions, usually literary journals and university presses.

One limitation though is that the poems featured in the site are largely Anglo-American in authorship and outlook. If you’re looking for homegrown (read: Filipino) talent, this is not the place to find it, no, not yet.

But you’re sure to read here the works of poets like Collins, Jonathan Gallasi, Seamus Heaney, Stanley Kunitz and Rita Dove, among many other outstanding bards of the day.

An exception is the Manila-born but San Francisco-bred poet Eugene Gloria, whose piece News of Pol Pot’s Capture appeared in an issue of poetrydaily. ("I could sleep like an entire race of bones underneath the tall grasses where a man hacks and hacks at something in the heat.") The poem belongs to the 30-piece collection Drivers at the Short-Time Motel published by Penguin Books. I surely look forward to finding more Fil-Am poets or poets with Filipino roots in the pages of poetrydaily.