Reading / Writing Space: January 2004 Archives
I left early last night to attend a John Edward's rally at Blueberry Hill on the Delmar Loop in St. Louis but still arrived too late. The site just couldn't hold all the people who had come to support Edwards. A few hundred of us lined up behind barricades and waited in the cold for an hour. Not a New Hampshire kind of cold, certainly, but it had iced and snowed earlier in the week and all of us were standing on an icepack. Feet got cold. Then Edwards arrived, the media with lights glaring swarmed toward him, I held up my sign, being a fellow Tarheel, and shouted, "Senator! Wilmington says, 'Go, Tarheel.'" I don't think he heard me, he didn't even look my way, but hopped up on a van, blinded by the lights, and shouted a few words of thanks, then made his way into the warmth of Blueberry Hill.
All of which made me think about presidents and poetry. Carter wrote poetry, but I think after his presidency. Lincoln wrote poems. "Memory" sometimes appears in books of inspirational verse. I think he wrote his poems while in office, most of which reflect his longing to be at home in Illinois. Oratory, speeches, when great, approach being poetry, but other than Lincoln, I can't think of a president who wrote his speeches. Most presidents have speechwriters to do that.
I wonder how the act of writing poetry would ef/af/fect a president's politics. Recent presidents have said certain poets have influenced their ways of thinking. Sometimes during inauguration a president will invite a poet to voice the soul of the country. But I don't know of any recent presidents who have written poetry to help them find their souls, to help them create their vision, to help them find their flaws, to help them rise to higher levels of understanding, acceptance, love, vision, and other altered states of mind and body made possible not by the reading of poetry, but by writing it.
I say all presidential candidates should be required to take a college course in poetry writing. They can come here to Meramec.
