I DID NOT HEAR ABOUT ANY OF THESE POETS
WHOM I NOW SAY DOMINATE THE WORLD OF POETRY IN ALL THE YEARS THAT I WAS
studying English Literature. from college to Master's program to Doctoral study. They were simply not part of the canon of poetry
in American education.
WHY? I don't know,
MAYBE because they did not write originally in English? MAYBE Because they were Progressive and endorsed reform and revolution?
MAYBE Because they were not from England or America?
MAYBE Because many of them are people of color?
You pick which one-- but I have had to learn about them when I wanted to understand the development of poetry.
WHY did I want to understand the DEVELOPMENT OF ---POETRY?
By then I was myself teaching poetry and since childhood I had been trying to write POETRY.
The one Poet and only poet from my list that I did know about was Patrick Pearse.
I knew him not as a poet but as a person who lead the Easter Rising in Dublin and was executed for his efforts.
WHY THE PRIMACY OF LOVE?
It is beautifully expressed in the aria in Puccinni's TOSCA
"Visi d'arte, visi d'amore --I lived for art, I lived for love."
What greater epitaph can anyone have?
The blessing that brought awareness of the wealth of international poetry into my life was my friendship and now 48 year long marriage to a brilliant man from India--Yashdip Bains,
He brought not only the great gifts of his intellect and his political acumen into our marriage, but also his several volume OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY and his beloved IBM EXECUTIVE typewriter.
Beyond all these gifts, he brought his love and expertise in international travel.
The first year that we met, both of us teaching at Rhode Island College, he learned that I was Irish and with a great interest in Irish drama. He urged me to go to see Ireland and offered to help with the arrangements for the summer months. Sure enough-- friends of his found a flat to sublet in Rathmines and I went to Dublin with my son Joey and Yash went to London for his annual pilgrimage to the lodestar of the British Museum Library.
So that was my first journey out of the country. But it would not be my last. It was a great privilege to be in other places and to learn the ways other cultures survive and thrive. We married the next year and after I completed my Doctoral dissertation on Bernard Shaw, our little family departed for Amritsar in Punjab, India. There, we were stationed at GURU NANAK DEV UNIVERSITY where Yashdip was Head of the English Department, and I was the only American in town. I met and saw so many new and exotic people and places. And I soon saw that I was strange and exotic to them too,
Because I am a person who talks to others I was a little abashed when I did not know even the names of poets that my new Indian friends knew and admired. I tell you all this not to boast of my travels but to say that without them I probably would have stayed pretty ignorant.
SO when I put forward my list of POETS WHO CHANGED THE WORLD and you do not know their names or work--please do not be abashed. I am not trying to show off. No, I am showing you and asking you to come in under the BIG TENT of World Poetry.
AND I hope that you will take my advice and open yourselves to reading and maybe even practicing new forms from other countries.
Like most immigrants, they will enrich our literature not harm it.
They will add to the rich tapestry of American poetry -- new colors, new threads, new patterns, new voices.
They will raise our sense of what we have in common and thus promote the BROTHERHOOD OF ALL MANKIND.
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