Their attention cannot be explained in terms of literacy or electricity - that they can't read or watch television. While our European-American tradition questions and argues, and has to teach poetry to sullen students in English classes, other cultures, speaking Spanish, Russina, Arabic, to say nothing of the many tongues of Africa and the Indian subcontinent, grow up inside poems, drenched through with poetic metaphors and rhythms. As we learn to criticize, to take a poem apart, to get its meaning, they learn to listen and to recite. By drawing this sharp contrast with other cultures, we are pointing to a defect in ours. We live in a poetically underdeveloped nation.
Men blame their own lives for a deficiency in the culture.
For, without the fanciful delicacy and the powerful truths that poems convey, emotions and imagination flatten out. For years we have opened and closed the gatherings of men with poems. Through the collaboration of everyone involved, the diversity and number of poems have grown. A question painfully put in one poem is answered in another. Sometimes the answering poem came from a man in the audiecne, so that listeners became tellers and the speakers heard lines forgotten or never heard before.