High School Haiku
school—
take out the “sh”
and it’s cool
The great Gwendolyn Brooks, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in the early 1950’s and Poet Laureate of Illinois for many years, asked in her Dedication to Picasso, “Does man love art?” Her answer: “Man visits art but cringes. Art hurts. Art urges voyages.”
Exactly. Art, which often begins in pain and horror, when it’s good ends in the imaginable; art embraces the entire territory of possibility. Art stands next to the world as such, the given or the received world, waving a colorful flag gesturing toward a world that should be, or a world that could be but is not yet. So if we believe that the world is perfect and in need of no improvement, or that the world is none of our business, or that we are at the end of history and that this is as good as it gets and that no repair is possible, then we must banish the arts, cuff and gag the artists—remember, they urge voyages. If, on the other hand, we see ourselves as works-in-progress, catapulting through a vibrant history-in-the-making, and if we feel a responsibility to engage and participate, then the arts are our strongest ally. It depends.
Perhaps that’s what Ferlinghetti was thinking when he published a slim volume with the provocative title Poetry