by Lisa Paige-Stone

April showers bring May flowers. We all know the bad rhyme.

But the rains of April have been feeding local poets, and live poetry in the region is blossoming with all the vigor of Central Pennsylvanian daffodils and tulips.

Students, teachers, appreciators, and poets gathered in great numbers to greet and welcome Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky to Messiah on April 5. His lilting, passionate, carefully paced reading moved the packed house to exuberant applause, as he meanwhile (paradoxically) theorized that the current upsurge in interest in poetry in our country is due to the fact that the poem, unlike the mass media (although, he said, he loves the mass media and in no way wishes to denigrate it) "is an individual experience." Heads bobbed in unison in agreement.

Pinsky read from several of his collections, including his most recent title, Jersey Rain. "Now near the end of the middle stretch of road/What have I learned?" reads the title poem. "Some earthly wiles./An art. That often I cannot tell good fortune from bad,/That once had seemed so easy to tell apart."

The poet laureate’s work speaks of life. Themes include political issues such as American exploitation of Third World Countries, and universal emotions and thoughts, such as those which precede death.

But Pinsky emphasized that he doesn’t write to present an opinion, although poetry is "as political as editorial copy" — "I write so that you can feel how I felt when I read Yeats," he explained. "You know when you see a toddler at a wedding, and people are dancing, and the kid starts going … " and Pinsky jives on the podium. "Well, that’s the idea," he went on. "Rather than aiming to make a point — not that I often don’t have a point in mind — I’d like to make you feel it." And the "it" is "the stuff of life."

Perhaps the one most remarkable thing about Pinsky is his ability to be both the learned poet/academic (he teaches at Boston University), and Everyman — as down to earth as is possible. During the Q and A session after his reading, someone asked, "Where do you like to write?" Pinsky admitted that he’s privileged and has a beautiful, quiet home on Cape Cod. But when he’s there, he said, he often finds himself too restless to write, more likely to get on the Internet or call a friend than to pick up the pen. "People make art in concentration camps," he said. "In prison people whittle soap. Asking me where I write is a little like asking me where I dream or sleep." He writes in airports, on trains — whenever the mood strikes.

Pinsky also had some clever repartee with questioners who wanted him to define the poet. He relied on the opinion once expressed by a professor of his own, who once said, "What separates the professor from the chimp is his use of language. The same thing separates the poet from the professor." And to those who wished for him to identify current trends in poetry, he argued, "Identifying trends is as useless as making predictions, which are usually wrong. Look at the 1936 World Fair’s idea of the year 2000. It tells you a lot about the year 1936."

Pinsky left the crowd with a somber thought. "The human is the art-making animal," he said, "and art-making is essential to survival. We have pathetic claws; our hide is feeble; we’re mediocre runners and not so good at jumping. We’re below par swimmers — yet we survive. The core of our intelligence is in our communication, and it’s a chain from our ancestors to us. We must continue the chain. Those of you who are students now — should you someday be sitting on a school board discussing cutting arts programs, remember this. Woe be to the generation that breaks that chain."

Pinsky urged the crowd as well to check out the website he’s founded, to which thousands of Americans have logged on to read others’ favorite poetry and enter poems they love and the reasons they love them: favoritepoem.org. But if you do so, prepare to become part of the movement in a country Pinsky loves because you don’t have to be "an aristocrat to appreciate poetry."