Olena Kalytiak Davis — in memory, in The New Yorker — and what a poem is

I'm absolutely certain that Olena Kalytiak Davis would not have loved the idea of me sometimes looking for the ephemera of her when I visited Alaska this past summer.

But I did. I searched. Couldn't help it.

I'd met her at Bread Loaf. She'd haunted us all. Reading in the moted light about a wedding dress. Sitting on a stoop in the early morning, the smoke of a cigarette swirling. The things people say and the things she said, and the delicate and fierce in her, and later, riding a train from DC with a fellow National Endowment for the Arts juror, the talk between him and me was almost all Olena. Where she was. What she was doing. How much better mystery is, than fame.

She lives in Alaska. She's a single mom and an attorney. She has a new book out, a third, "The Poem She Didn't Write and Other Poems." And also: Dan Chiasson just gave her two amazing pages in this week's issue of The New Yorker.

I gasped when I saw it. Hadn't found her in Alaska. Found her here, in the dark, after a many-hour work day, when I needed a little actual poetry.

From the last paragraph in this exquisite bit of appreciation, lessons on poetry, thoughts on Davis:

The medium of poetry isn't language, really; it's human loneliness, a loneliness that poets, having received it themselves from earlier poets, transfer to their readers. Like bees in a honeycomb, writers and readers experience isolation and solitude communally and collaboratively.... Writing a poem, you create that vivid otherness; reading one, you re-create it in your own person. These two lonely souls, writer and reader, are bound to one another. They can be miles or centuries apart, but in Davis's book the passage between them sees some heavy traffic.

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To Read or Not to Read: The NEA Study

Like most authors and parents, I've been paying close attention to the recent NEA report, "To Read or Not to Read." Described as the most comprehensive survey of American reading, the study reveals what many of us already suspected to be true: Elementary school reading may be on the rise, tweens may still be turning to books for pleasure, but teens and adults are not, by and large, carving out time in their lives for literature of any sort. It's not just the book industry that's suffering. It's society at large—employers who grow increasingly frustrated with the compromised ability of new employees to read, to understand, and to write; political and cultural institutions that are struggling to gain passionate civic support; families that grow more fractured.

Americans are reading less, and so, of course, they are reading less well, and when you aren't reading well you put many crucial things at risk, not least among them the ability to empathize and to form and express a point of view.

So that here we are, living in an era when high school students are packing their resumes with A.P. courses and club presidencies, and when, despite this madcap race toward perfection, they find themselves in need of a writing consultants' help when they sit down to write their college application essays. Here we are, living in an era when the career expectations of new college graduates are high, despite the fact that a frightening percent of them are barely reading at a proficiency level. Here we are, facing, as a world, enormous political and environmental challenges—challenges that will only be overcome with the very best, most well-read minds.

Once, when screening candidates for a communications job on behalf of a client, I read some 100 resumes and writing samples. In the entire collection there were but four or five who wrote accurately, and two who wrote with style. These were candidates for a communications job—individuals who, by all rights, should have been obsessed with words.

Our children have so much to dissuade them from reading. It's hard. It's hardly fast. It's not available in stereo sound. I know the excuses, because I found myself, a few years ago, faced with the reluctant reader of my son. In my book SEEING PAST Z, I wrote about our struggle to make the stories found inside the pages of books real and alive and powerful. We found the glory of reading, my son and I, through the glory of the conversation that took place afterward. His perceptions measured against mine. His questions taking me back to look for a passage that might better explain a character to us both. So that now, when there's no homework pressing, no college applications to mail, I'll find him upstairs, curled up on his bed, turning the pages of a book.

We live in a world in which instant connections are possible. Making books exceptionally relevant again means, I think, reminding ourselves and those we love that books are not islands, not isolating. They are about you and me. They are social.

For a recent Talk of the Nation segment on the topic, please visit: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16739654

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