Stopped.

The Portland Public School nearest to me is an alternative school called the Metropolitan Learning Center, and today they had their annual Race for the Arts. They collected pledges and ran laps around the city block where the school is located, each runner carrying a yellow card to be ticked off at the completion of each full lap around the block. They run through falling cherry blossoms, over a hill by the synagogue, and past hundreds of parked cars. They collect the money from their pledges and buy themselves an artist in residence for a semester, since "budget problems" have cut funding for the arts in schools. I wish old men had to run laps to fund the purchase of missiles and weapons.

I'm reading Jeanette Winterson's memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? She writes of growing up in a family (like mine) where books were forbidden, poetry was a waste of time. She discovers (by accident) T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral and, like this child, she is stopped in her tracks. She writes:

I had no one to help me, but the T.S. Eliot helped me.

So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or that it shouldn't be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. That is what literature offers--a language powerful enough to say how it is.

It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.

--Jeanette Winterson.