While poetry books may not sell a lot of copies, people do still connect with poetry. U.S. poet Robert Pinsky, during his term as poet laureate, set up the Favorite Poem Project. 18,000 people sent in submissions. Fifty of them appear in videos on the project’s web site, reading their favorite poems and talking about how those poems connect with their lives– all kinds of people, reading a wide variety of poems. One young man from Boston reads “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks and says, “It just made so much sense. It was like telling my story.” A woman reads “The Sentence” by Anna Akhmatova and tells how it precisely describes what happened to her brother in the Vietnam war. These are moving stories.
1 comment