First Mailing: A brief introduction to these letters, referring to Whitman and William Carlos Williams…

I began sending poems to colleagues in Washington in March, 2009.  This first message was intended as an introduction to my ‘project’ of sending out poems.  One can’t, after all, just send poems to people without any context at all.  This first message came with a small header, “Huck Gutman, whom you will know in various roles – professor of English at the University of Vermont, friend, correspondent, former teacher – is currently living mostly in Washington, D.C. (and partly in Burlington, Vermont) and working as Chief of Staff for U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders.  He is on leave from the University of Vermont.”

Looking back, I recognize that this introductory email exemplifies something I said in it, but that I had not realized I revealed: that I live at times in a world of poems.  Though this introduction is short, it quotes lines by Whitman (three times), Rilke and Williams. Poetry is, for me, a response to the world and a guide through it; it often serves as a ‘touchstone,’ a term used by Matthew Arnold which I will address in a later email.

In the past two weeks I have sent four people poems, each with a modest commentary to situate the poem. To a new acquaintance I met at the State of the Union speech, I sent two lyrics by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney.  To a Washington friend who works in the administration, a poem by Wallace Stevens and another by A. R. Ammons.  To a U.V.M. friend I emailed an excerpt from a long narrow work (narrow because it was originally written on a roll of adding machine paper) by Ammons.  I emailed it because I had  been reading the poem and figured my friend would be interested in my response.  Just a few days ago I sent several poems by Melville to a man whom I met on the street at a yard sale in my neighborhood; we had stood in front of the used furniture and books, talking about poetry and war.

  Though nowadays I live in a world of legislation and politics, there seems no stop to the poems which suffuse my life: they seep into my consciousness at all sorts of moments, and at times I even have a need to tell people about them.

  I realize time and again that I very much miss teaching poetry.  Often I find myself telling colleagues here on Capitol Hill that teaching is on some very deep level more fulfilling than working in the Senate.  My guess is that ninety-five percent of the folks on the Hill to whom I say that do not believe me, do not believe that I am serious. 

  A year ago I was so concerned about being unconnected to teaching that I volunteered to teach, and in fact did teach, an introductory poetry course (generously sponsored by the University of Vermont, which provided academic credits to the students without even a dollar of tuition changing hands) at Bell Multi-Cultural High School here in Washington.  My students were wonderful, I loved teaching the class . . .  but I was doing what amounted to a third of a full-time teaching load piggy-backed onto an excessively full-time job on Capitol Hill.  It proved sustainable only as a one-time experience.

  The early twentieth-century German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote of himself, in the concluding lines to his “Self-Portrait,” that his imperfect face still looked, “as though, from far off, with scattered things,/ a serious true work were being planned.” 

  No, I am not planning on writing a great body of poetic work, as Rilke did. 

  But a number of times I have thought that with all that goes on here in Washington, all that swirls around and through my everyday life – legislation written, temporary alliances engaged, political battles resolved, cabinet members scheduled to visit our office, political strategies proved successful and un-, new national programs launched with our participation, staff hired and supervised, constituents seen – it would make sense to write about life in Washington.  (One of the finest historians at U.V.M., a retired expert on Russian history, counseled me to keep a journal every day.)

  Fat chance.  Though that makes good sense, writing about Washington’s inner workings is somehow not intriguing enough to me to draw me in.

  Instead, what I think about is poems. 

  I read them, fitfully to be sure, on the Metro and the busses.  I mention them to my friends, and sometimes photocopy them for, or send them by email to, those whom I think will be interested. 

  On occasion I used to read a poem to my staff colleagues on the Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee, some twenty to thirty people.  I'd bring them a copy of a poem by Williams or Dickinson, hand it out, and read it.  Whew.  I think they were, not always positively, astonished.  (Whitman writes, in 'Song of Myself': “Do you take it I would astonish?/ Does the daylight astonish? does the early redstart twittering through the woods?/ Do I astonish more than they?”  Oh, that Whitman: he nails it almost every time!)

  You may now have an inkling of where this is heading.  I have decided that I will send a poem, along with a brief accompanying commentary, every few weeks to a list of people I know, people in Washington (on the Hill, in the administration, folks I have met, friends) and people in Vermont (at the University of Vermont, in local politics, neighbors, folks, friends) and people elsewhere (friends and relations.  And to, insofar as I can locate their addresses, former students.

  The first weekly mailing will follow in a few days. 

  Why should we read poems?  Not because they are good medicine, though I suppose they are.  (That Whitman!  He does itch at one's brain.  “I shall be good health to you nonetheless,/ and filter and fiber your blood,” he wrote in ‘Song of Myself.’)

  Surely not because if we read them we can claim to be in some way smart or special.

  Not because poems are 'culture,' since culture always is around us in one form or another.

  Whitman, as so often, with great insight provided a deeply satisfying answer to why we should read poems.    He wrote two lines which, to my mind, are the zodiacal sign under which lyric poetry is written.  He bravely blurts out, in ‘Song of Myself’ immediately after the lines I quoted above about how he should not be seen as any more “astonishing” than sunlight or a bird or any other natural phenomenon, “This hour I tell things in confidence,/ I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.” 

  “This hour I tell things in confidence,/ I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.”  To which, across a century, William Carlos Williams responded, affirmatively, about our deep need for those things that poets tell us, in confidence:

  Look at

                    what passes for the new.

You will not find it there but in

          despised poems.

                    It is difficult

to get the news from poems

          yet men die miserably every day

                    for lack

of what is found there.

Enough already.  The first email about a poem will follow in the next couple of days.  If you don't want to receive these emails, you can stop them by replying with “opt out” in the subject line

Best wishes,

Huck