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International Poetry Day, newspaper edition

By: Grant Hamilton

Monday, Mar. 26, 2012 at 2:05 PM | Comments: 0

Apaprently today (March 21) is International Poetry Day.

I'm not sure who sets up these days — according to Twitter, it's also International Hoodie Day? — but in my opinion, poetry doesn't get enough respect.

It's all prose these days. And longer prose is better. Just ask anyone trying to publish a book of poems or short stories.

Oddly, I suspect that a well-crafted poem could actually have more resonance in these days of text messaging, status updates and the aforementioned Twitter.

A good poem is like a mind worm. It is generally short enough to consume in one sitting, but a good one will get inside your head and burrow around, forever changing the way you think.

(The very best tweets, you could argue, might be akin to a haiku — achieving transcendence through brevity.)

So, in honour of International Poetry, here's a little poem by one of my favourite authors, Stephen Crane. It's has a little relevance to where you are reading it, too:

A newspaper is a collection of half-injustices
Which, bawled by boys from mile to mile,
Spreads its curious opinion
To a million merciful and sneering men,
While families cuddle the joys of the fireside
When spurred by tale of dire lone agony.
A newspaper is a court
Where every one is kindly and unfairly tried
By a squalor of honest men.
A newspaper is a market
Where wisdom sells its freedom
And melons are crowned by the crowd.
A newspaper is a game
Where his error scores the player victory
While another's skill wins death.
A newspaper is a symbol;
It is feckless life's chronicle,
A collection of loud tales
Concentrating eternal stupidities,
That in remote ages lived unhaltered,
Roaming through a fenceless world.

You could do a lot worse than reading more Stephen Crane. He's best known for his Civil War novel, "The Red Badge of Courage," but his poems were ahead of their time as well.

Like the best of Crane's work, one of the things I like about this particular poem is how it undercuts itself, especially at the end. It seems at first to be highly critical of the news media — a business that Crane, who spent several years as a celebrity reporter, would have known well — but a closer read shows more ambiguity.

Sure, a newspaper may be "feckless life's chronicle," but that is not the same as "life's feckless chronicle." It's not the newspaper's fault, but life's.

And is it as bad as all that? Pay attention to the final three lines. A newspaper may collect those "eternal stupidities," but before there were newspapers, those very same stupidities "lived unhaltered / Roaming through a fenceless world."

In other words, Crane is saying that newspapers may be full of bad news, poorly reported — but you can't blame the messenger.

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