Why We Read... Poetry

People come in many colors, shapes, and sizes. They have adapted to radically different climates, unique political situations, and clashing worldviews. Therefore, it is always startling when some incident comes along and reveals that we are not so different after all. And ever since the first man realized he could connect with a stranger on a deeply human level with words, humans have had poetry. Poetry is a dynamic and fluid art form created deliberately to receive a special kind of attention and evoke thoughts and feelings in its audience. Poetry speaks to a part of us ruled not by logic, but by our fears, desires, empathy, and hearts. Poetry lives and breathes, and without an attentive audience, it would die.

Nearly every person who takes the time to form a definition of poetry will come to a different conclusion, which is not so much discouraging as it is terribly exciting. Poet Lyn Hejinian wrote in her introduction to The Best American Poetry 2004, “the fact that there are no answers is one source of the vitality of the art form” (Hejinian, 9). Poetry evades definition because the only piece of it that is tangible is the written word, and this visible aspect is a miniscule part of the product. The product is a feeling, a conversation, and a better understanding of the human condition. Poetry is difficult to define because it is vast, dynamic, and ever-changing.

I feel that defining poetry is similar to defining beauty. I recently sat through a classmate’s Sociology presentation that outlined how the idea of beauty is socially constructed and affects society in unexpected ways. A woman today may be called a “classic beauty,” but the criteria for beauty is modified drastically from era to era. Despite personal preferences, the members of every society collectively agree upon what is "beautiful," and it is a fact that those beautiful people will receive a certain kind of attention that often gives them privilege. Beautiful people are more likely to receive second chances, be given jobs, and be considered kind and sociable. In this same way, poetry asks us to pay it a certain kind of attention and to give it the benefit of the doubt if we don’t understand it the first, second, or hundredth time we read it. If it is successful, its audience will fall under its spell and give it the attention it craves.

I choose to give poetry my attention when it evokes in me a feeling that I can’t name, but also can not shake. T.S. Eliot wrote that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” Several times throughout this course I have heard a poem speak to me before I knew what it is saying. One of my first encounters with this phenomenon was while reading Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland.” In a forum post about the poem I wrote, “It is strange to me that I can be moved so poignantly by a poem that I don’t even understand.” This was still weeks before I learned the term Eliot himself coined the “objective correlative,” in which the poet uses an image to evoke an emotion without naming it. He successfully caused me to feel the heaviness of death in “The Wasteland” through his descriptions of fleeting seasons, “dull roots,” and “dead land.” It created in me the initial pull that made me want to spend more time with the poem.

As with beauty, we hope that poetry’s lure is not only skin deep. If people are going to spend time in contemplation over a splatter of words across a page, the words must tell them something important. This is what Yusef Komunyakaa argued as he wrote an introduction to The Best American Poetry 2003. He expressed concern about the way some poets mask their messages “through a language that deliberately confuses and blurs meaning” (Komunyakaa, 13). He believes that poetry should be written in response to events and feelings, and asks the question, “To what extent can language be distorted before it loses meaning, before it erases itself” (Komunyakaa, 17)?

Komunyakaa was a poet featured in the anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, which featured the work of 145 poets responding to conflict in various parts of the world throughout the twentieth-century. Many of the poets in the collection wrote under severe tyranny and repression. Sometimes they encoded their poetry with secret meanings to avoid execution or jail, but many were extremely brave by expressing their anger at powerful regimes as well as their sadness at the deaths of innocent people. Komunyakaa praises the poets because poetry should bring conflicts to the surface and refuse people the luxury of forgetting.

One poet featured in Against Forgetting was Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian-born poet, playwright, and author who responded with poetry to apartheid in his home country. One of his poems, “Massacre, October ’66,” subtly documents the genocide that claimed the lives of 10,000 people. Soyinka spent years of his life in solitary confinement because of his outspokenness about the conflict he was witnessing, but even in a tiny, dank cell, he found means to pen his feelings. By writing, Soyinka has brought light to a conflict that drastically altered and even ended the lives of millions of individuals. He successfully fulfils the job description of a poet that author Salman Rushdie describes is “to name the un-nameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep” (Rushdie).

Another poet I encountered who, through his art, connects readers with a population frequently kept silent is Mark Doty. Doty is a popular American poet who has received attention for his often autobiographical and anecdotal poetry. A theme that shines through Doty’s work is that of love in all its forms. Doty often writes about gay issues because he feels that the gay experience is misrepresented or completely erased in current culture (Contemporary Poets). I enjoyed reading his book Turtle, Swan this semester because he seamlessly blended stories and sentiment that made me feel connected to him and simultaneously gave me a window into a life very different from my own in which parents were not a constant guiding presence and AIDS was a devastating reality. Because I am human, I can relate to my fellow human’s anxieties and dreams, even if we come from very different circumstances.

One thing that does not define poetry is its form. Poetry takes countless shapes- from Hejinian’s thick, blocky stanzas in My Life, to G.C. Waldrep’s sporadically indented stanzas with words floating mid-page in Disclamor, to the classic, lyric-like stanzas of Emily Dickinson. Form is a tool that poets use to call attention to their poetry and manipulate their audience’s eyes and minds, but it is impossible to say that because words are arranged in a certain way, they are or are not a poem. Even a novel, I have decided, should not be refused the right to be called poetry. I have read books that speak directly to my heart, that connect me to another place and time, and that still live and breathe inside of me years later, and I would challenge anybody who would try to tell me they are not poetry.

Any mention of the novel My Antonia by Willa Cather, which I read two years ago, causes my heart to skip a beat because I was so affected by her descriptions of the Nebraska prairie and the people who lived there. Who could deny the beauty and truth of the words, “There was only—spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere; in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind—rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted. If I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known it was spring” (Cather, 790)? This book has become a part of me.

Indeed, poetry is alive. It requires love and it loves company. If a poem is left cramped inside a book without air, it will die. We know that the poetry we read today is, in fact, poetry because it has survived. If we stop reading it, it will cease to be. All poetry that exists has earned and retained our attention, opened our eyes and our hearts to what is unique and universal, wonderful and discouraging, frightening and exhilarating about our world. All it asks of us in return is to feel, to respond, and to keep reading.


Works Cited

Cather, Willa. Early Novels and Stories. New York, N.Y: Literary Classics of the United States, 1987. Print.

“Mark (A.) Doty.” Contemporary Poets. Gale, 2001. Gale Biography In Context. Web. 7 Feb. 2011.

Hejinian, Lyn. Introduction. Lyn Hejinian and David Lehman, eds. The Best American Poetry .2004. Scribner, 2004. 9-14. Print.

Komunyakaa, Yusef. Introduction. Yusef Komunyakaa and David Lehman, eds. The Best American Poetry 2003. New York: Scribner, 2003. 11-21. Print.

Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. New York, NY: Viking, 1989. Print.