On Poetry, the How and Why of It

Poetry. Seems dead.

Even hearing its purported virtues can feel high-minded, conservative, retrograde, stodgy, stuffy, fanciful, a plain waste of time.

It’s not.

It can shape us

well beyond

the broken lines on

the page.

Why read poetry?

So why read it? Few others do it seems.^[1]In some age groups the numbers are actually quite strong.

In a basic way poetry, with its awkward syntax and juxtapositions and densities and efficiencies, challenges us. It puts words in a new frame or, sometimes, none at all.

It can make us feel befuddled, frustrated, angry, dismissive, despairing, incompetent, tired even tricked.

From these feelings we can flee. The ones we deny, repress and subconsciously, impulsively coat with reliable hits of dopamine.

Yet if we opt not to hide there are feelings on the other side of it all: joy and satisfaction^[2]Of the kind that can only come from having stayed with something so that it can reveal more than what was at first there and others that can only be yours.

Sometimes there’s more frustration too, but with that now is a fledgling tolerance for it.

And that’s just it. Reading poetry opens us, not just to new language but to a new state of being. One accustomed to challenges, to all the feelings that come up around challenges.

That can be a spouse, child, boss, home, dislocation, love, death, nature, a crisis.

There is, through poetry, a willingness to receive, to see, to allow that life, more like a sculpture than a two-dimensional canvas, calls us to see the many sides of things, to at least make space for them as possible.

Poetry is revelation and it seems to suggest that our act of living can be too.

On Intimacy

I have been reading the poetry of Jorie Graham. While doing so I’ve felt I’m falling in love.

This is not surprising. Reading poetry is an act of proximity, vulnerability, intimacy.

It is, despite the use of words and their rhythm, also profoundly silent.

It is you and another, their deepest parts, the crevices of their psyches, formed, revealed, now shared. It is the poet’s exposed self asking for yours.

There is a rare knocking at your heart. Walls must be sacrificed. Something not there, not felt, now is. A birth.

On How

Perhaps the most crucial part of reading poetry is to read it. By that I mean to pick up a poem and simply read it.

Worry not about what each word means, about line breaks and still deeper meaning. About whether you’re doing it right. Simply read it.

Then—and this is crucial— re-read it. Through this re-engagement a different meaning, often slight, begins to emerge.

That is all that’s required. From there one has done enough work.

Another reading, if desired, may occur. Or one can move on.

For the uninclined poetry can be served as an aperitif.

In reading a poem one may wonder: What do I have to lose?

Perhaps only your former self.