Poetry needs to recapture its place as a vocal American art, said the program director of the “Favorite Poem Project,” the brainchild of former Poet Laureate and Boston University professor Robert Pinsky, yesterday at Marsh Chapel.
The project began four years ago with Pinksy’s unprecedented three-year term as U.S. Poet Laureate, said Maggie Dietz, a graduate of the Creative Writing Program, to about 20 people gathered at the “Food for Thought” lecture series.
“Poetry is a vocal art meant to be read aloud. Poetry is not as much a part of [United States] society as it could be,” Dietz said, paraphrasing Pinsky.
While the single official duty of the U.S. Poet Laureate is to coordinate a reading program at the Library of Congress, she said recent recipients have made more of the position.
Dietz described the Favorite Poem Project as a way for Americans to read aloud the poems they enjoy. The founders of the project wanted to create “an archive of historical importance” and “a snapshot of America through poetry,” she said.
Pinsky and Dietz began looking for Americans to recite and discuss their favorite poems on video in 1998.
“The medium of video dramatizes poetry as a physical art,” Dietz said. “It’s engaging and provocative to see someone say aloud a poem they love.”
After a year of collecting responses, the Favorite Poem Project had 18,000 letters from people ages 5-97 in all 50 states. Later project goals were set to represent every ethnicity, different kinds of poetic writing and to include poems that were not American or originally written in English.
The most recent phase of the project featured 50 filmed readings. The videos are showcased at the end of “Newshour with Jim Lehrer” and are available at the project website, www.favoritepoem.com.
BU hosts the next phase of the project, The Summer Poetry Institute for Educators, which is slated for July 9-13. This program is organized with the School of Education and includes multicultural teachers from elementary, middle and high schools, who teach in a range of settings, from urban to rural.
Dietz said a major aim of the project is to bring poetry to children. The seminar will focus on a “person to person introduction to poems.”
“[The children] get to see that poetry isn’t just something on the page that is meant to be deciphered, but is significant to people’s lives,” Dietz said.
In addition to Pinsky, Institute faculty members will include Frank Bidart, David Ferry, Louise Glick and Rosanna Warren. Dietz will showcase the video segments with Pinsky.
In the future, Project members want to bring archived materials to schools and libraries across the country. A recent $200,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation will help fulfill this objective.
“I hope that having these program materials available will entice teachers and administrators to bring poetry into schools,” said BU spokeswoman Laura Mikols.
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