December 05, 2006

    I don’t know why poetry matters. Why shouldn’t it? Why should it matter any less than anything else? Do people wonder if music matters? Not as much. Why should everyone who loves poetry be called upon to justify it? Who says poetry is hard to understand? You’re hard to understand. Who are you?
    Look at a flower. It’s pretty. Maybe you like it. Why do you like it? Some people may tell you the flower is inaccessible. What’s the meaning of the flower? There’s got to be a meaning. Some may think the flower is boring. They’ve seen other flowers and those flowers were boring. This flower is probably boring too. Others may say there’s no money in liking your flower. Right they are. Liking that flower is never going to get you a Mercedes, or even a Kia. Your student loans are mounting up. Stomp on the flower. There’s a plastic-flower factory just down the road. Maybe you can work there in publicity.
    I don’t know anything about the philosophy of poetry. It doesn’t matter to me why poetry matters. I just know that it does. It matters in a lot of places, to a lot of people. On Pablo Neruda’s birthday, poems and flowers shower onto the streets of Santiago. Twenty years ago, Argentinean poets were often made political prisoners because their verse was considered volatile, dangerous. Of course contemporary American poets can write whatever they want and nothing will happen to them. This is not so much because of the First Amendment as because nobody’s reading them.
    So I think poetry could make a big difference. If it doesn’t in the United States, is that poetry’s fault? There is important, mind-cracklingly good poetry out there. Poetry that could change the way people see the world or crystallize what’s always been inside them. If they read it.
    I know a man who worries that he ought to be doing something more useful with his time. He wants to help people. He thinks it’s selfish to sit around finding ways to say “fuchsia” when there are people starving and fighting and dying. And he’s right.
    What I don’t understand is why he believes writing poetry and helping others are mutually exclusive. Not even the most successful poets are making a living off their poetry alone. Poetry is a profession that requires you to go out and do something else. Look at Neruda. Tomas Tranströmer is a psychologist. Václav Havel was a poet and playwright who helped head the Velvet Revolution and became president of the Czech Republic.
    One of my professors once said he knows a good poem when he cuts himself shaving thinking about it the next morning. So that poem has made a difference to him. You can see the proof right there in the nick on his cheek. Another teacher told me the right poem could save a person’s life. I think poetry can if you let it.
    I don’t even like to remember my life before poetry came into it. Great poems are electric, white-hot. They brand themselves into your skin. If you’re not reading poetry then you’re missing out.
    I’m sick of being polite when people tell me they don’t like it. They don’t teach it well in school, I say, or it’s not for everyone. Poetry could be for everyone. It’s as diverse as the world itself. There’s a Russian poem that begins like this: “General, I quit. Our maps are crap.” Li-Young Lee begins a poem, “The moon is one part/ Whoever’s looking.”
    There are lines like, “My wit and worth are brushed aside/In the full flare of grief. Do what you will.” There are poems about uprisings and football and middle school and geese overhead.  There’s a poem out there for everyone, I swear it.
    Some say poetry is dead. But everything’s been said to be dead. God, romance, the novel, irony, tragedy. Autopsies have been performed, caskets lowered into the ground with various degrees of sobriety and glee.
    When people say something is dead, they mean it’s dead to them. It’s pretty presumptuous to announce that God is dead for everybody, all over. I say poetry’s feeling just fine.
    It would matter even if it was just beautiful. Beauty’s enough. But I’m ready to fight for it. I know a lot of people who feel the same way.
    My argument’s a mess. I haven’t gotten started yet. Go on. Question the relevance of poetry to the modern experience. Say it has nothing to do with the real world. Tell me you can’t fix a roof with a poem, tell me poetry’s boring.
    I don’t have a theory, but I’m ready. I know a poem that will knock you out.

Sarah Todd