BILL KNIGHT
Anticipating reader reaction to a Community Word feature on metro Peoria’s poetry scene and the timelessness of appreciating verse, I revisit the notion of its ties to prose, especially journalism, as I’ve written before.
Also, 134 years ago this month, Archibald MacLeish was born in Illinois, the start of a life and career in poetry, prose and government work.
MacLeish was a “modernist” poet who twice won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and a journalist for Fortune and The New Republic magazines (He also was a lawyer, Librarian of Congress, war-time propagandist, professor and playwright — his play “J.B.” also won a Pulitzer).
In 1958 he delivered a lecture, “Poetry & Journalism,” in Minnesota, where he said, “Poetry is an art — or should be. But is journalism the opposite of art? The recognition that the newspaper story or the magazine article is capable of a form comparable to the great form of fiction is as just as it is belated. You cannot distinguish journalism from poetry merely by saying one is an art and the other isn’t.”
Journalism tries to be impartial and fair; poetry turns to emotional significance apart from events themselves.
“Poetry may take liberties with … materials … which history and journalism are not free to take,” MacLeish said. “But it neither will nor can disguise their origins in experience.”
“I am not suggesting that the facts of journalism are insubstantial,” MacLeish continued. “I am merely suggesting that there is no such difference between the ‘facts’ of journalism and the ‘fancies’ of poetry.”
Illinois has had other journalists who wrote poetry: Fulton County Ledger journalist Edgar Lee Masters (Lewistown), syndicated humor columnist Don Marquis (Walnut), Chicago Day Book and Daily News writer Carl Sandburg (Galesburg), and sportswriter Rick Telander (Peoria) — who in 2023 wrote a book of poetry for children, “Sweet Dreams,” copies of which he donated to Ronald McDonald Houses, including Peoria’s.
‘Words matter’ — Poets of Peoria
Nationwide, the country’s notable journalists/poets include Brooklyn newspaper reporter Walt Whitman, AP newsman W. Dale Nelson, and New Jersey newspaper editor David Tucker.
Tucker wrote that days “go by in a blur. Journalists are trying to slow it down for the reader. Poets are trying to stop it forever, if they can. They complement each other; they can and do overlap. Poetry is often as plain-spoken as good journalism and in general poets strive for clarity and precision even more, I think, than you will find in the newspaper.”
There are distinctions, of course: uses of words, patterns of words, sequences of words. But those are less differences in kind than in focus. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world; poetry with the feel of the world.
Similarities can stem from reader reactions, Tucker added, “Poets and journalists are both sentimentalized and loathed. When it comes right down to it, many readers are ambivalent about poets and reporters [alike] because they don’t spare our feelings in the search for truth. A great reporter’s first loyalty is to the story, wherever it takes us — as a poet’s is to the poem — not to a boss or institution, or an accepted stereotype.
“Another thing they have in common,” Tucker continued,
“ — many readers have little idea how much work goes into a good [news] story or poem.”
Edward Abbey, the late essayist, environmental advocate and author (“Lonely Are the Brave,” “The Monkey Wrench Gang”) in “The Journey Home” compared poetry and science that, re-worded slightly, anticipated the bridge between poetry and journalism: “Any good poet … must begin with the journalistic view of the world; and any journalist worth listening to must be something of a poet, must possess the ability to communicate … his sense of love and wonder at what his work discovers.”