All of America's popular music—jazz, country, rock and roll, and hip hop—develops from the Delta blues. Its words gave voice to the lives of workers in the fields of the Deep South. The blues may have something to do with sadness, but singing it is an act of defiance, not despair(绝望). The blues reminds us of our weak points while encouraging us to see how far we can actually go.

    We can still almost touch the origin of this art form. Looking back on the journey the blues took north up the Mississippi River-when African Americans left the South in search of new jobs-photographer Gail Mooney travelled from Chicago clubs down to the Delta to get the stories of blues men and blues women. They are still here today to link us to the music's early days.

    "In our conversations, we talked so much more about other things than their music," says Mooney, whose exhibition of the blues has just begun a US tour this spring. "We talked about their childhoods, their cultural origin, and a time in America when people moved to live in large cities. I would listen, and sometimes I would get a feeling."

    These photos show some of the musicians who worked and studied with blues pioneers—drummer Sam Carr was the son of Robert Nighthawk, while Pinetop Perkins and Willie "Big Eyes" Smith played together with Muddy Waters.

    Already, this generation is leaving us: Little Milton, guitarist and vocalist, and Robert "Junior" Lockwood (who learned from Robert Johnson, the greatest blues man of all) have passed away since Mooney began her project. However, they left many valuable things to us. Turn on your radio and some little piece of the Delta gets passed down again.

    Reading poems is not exactly an everyday activity for most people. In fact, many people never read a poem once they get out of high school.

    It is worth reminding ourselves that this has not always been the case in America. In the nineteenth century, a usual American activity was to sit around the fireside in the evening and read poems aloud. It is true that there was no television at the time, nor movie theaters, nor World Wide Web, to provide diversion. However, poems were a source of pleasure, of self-education, of connection to other people or to the world beyond one's own community. Reading them was a social act as well as an individual one, and perhaps even more social than individual. Writing poems to share with friends and relations was, like reading poems by the fireside, another way in which poetry has a place in everyday life.

    How did things change? Why are most Americans no longer comfortable with poetry, and why do most people today think that a poem has nothing to tell them and that they can do well without poems?

    There are, I believe, three culprits(肇事者): poets, teachers, and we ourselves. Of these, the least important is the third: the world surrounding the poem has betrayed us more than we have betrayed the poem. Early in the twentieth century, poetry in English headed into directions unfavorable to the reading of poetry. Readers decided that poems were not for the fireside or the easy chair at night, that they belonged where other difficult-to-read things belonged.

    Poets failed the reader, so did teachers. They want their students to know something about the skills of a poem, they want their students to see that poems mean something. Yet what usually occurs when teachers push these concerns on their high school students is that young people decide poems are unpleasant crossword puzzles.