Could You Stand a Poetry Stand?

It's an icy, snowy Saturday afternoon in the Ozarks, not bitterly cold but below freezing. Putting off some work, I poked around on the Internet and found "Poetry Stand," by Douglas Goetsch, in the Autumn 2007 issue of The American Scholar. Goetsch writes about a poetry field trip he took a group of students on, when he was teaching poetry at the New Jersey Governor’s School of the Arts.

Goetsch had the students run a poetry stand in Princeton, before the gates into the campus. Anyone could come to the stand and request a poem in any form about any topic. The students used scouts to bring some "customers" to the stand (there was no charge for the poems), but many people approached voluntarily. It would seem that if you offer people poetry that relates to their concerns, some of them will take you up on the offer.

I recommend Goetsch's article because it raises issues of poetry and the general public, of the attitude of poets toward "ordinary" people. His work with the students went a long way, apparently, to dismantle their initial perception of themselves as strange and wonderful and other people, non-poets, as dull and boring. Is the poet really a winged being from another realm, someone excruciatingly special, or is the poet a human much like others, but with the talents and training to voice human experiences in meaningful and moving ways? The statement of the opposites is mine, but I believe they reflect "Poetry Stand" accurately.

Goetsch sees poets as humans who can articulate human experiences into poetry. He is thoroughly focused on craft. I pretty much agree, with the qualification that there are as many ways of being a poet as there are of being human. And perhaps the phrasing is misleading: if "being a poet" means that one is a person who can write poems, that's fine; if "being a poet" means one is a person who is strange and wonderful and unlike the ordinary — well, ultimately, all of us are strange and wonderful, not just those who designate themselves as such.