The Purpose of Poetry

In another post, I wrote about the importance of writing. Today, I want to write about the importance and the purpose of poetry and offer some writing prompts for you at the bottom of this post.

The Purpose of Poetry

Recently, we were at Eric’s much younger cousin’s wedding; Raffi is closer in age to my kids; I watched him grow up. At the wedding, I found myself crying tears of joy and awe for the largeness of life. At the reception, around many people in their late twenties, I thought again about how at once exciting and daunting it is to create our lives—amid all the dangers, limitations, and possibilities around us, we forge a path forward. How do we do that?

In my twenties, of all the possible things to do with my life, I decided to study literature and poetry in particular. Why? In a world in which 9 million people die from hunger each year, why literature? Literature wasn’t going to save those people and it wasn’t going to make my life easy or make me rich, but I believed in the nourishment of literature as something almost as important as food. And I still do. I chose to study poetry in particular because it offered other ways of being, of connecting.

And it occurred to me that each poem is in its way a little place of ceremony, of attention, of condensed meaning, like a wedding itself, and it’s no surprise that so many weddings include poems. Poetry helps us be more awake, more aware, more alive. It helps us be aware of where we are and also turn in the direction we want to go.

What is the Purpose of Poetry? Why Poetry?

For many people, this question may at first seem irrelevant. Either you love to read and write poetry, or poetry has no particular interest for you, and in either case, abstract reasoning about it might feel beside the point.

But since at least the 16th century in the English-speaking world, poets have been writing treatises on the importance of poetry. Philip Sidney’s famous Apology for Poetry rested on poetry’s ability to teach its readers through “delight” and lead them to “virtuous action.” In the early 19th century, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Defense of Poetry rested on poetry’s ability to train the imagination; poetry, he wrote, “awakens and enlarges the mind itself.”

Today, poetry’s cultural centrality is drastically diminished (Shelley’s friend and contemporary Lord Byron, for example, enjoyed a status almost like today’s contemporary pop stars), but poetry’s pleasures and lessons are, if anything, all the more valuable, and being explicit about its benefits help reminds us of what poetry is and also who we are, for poetry helps show us ourselves.

Poetry is there for all stages, all moods, all experiences of life. Chidiock Tichborne wrote his wonderful “Elegy” to himself in 1586 in the Tower of London the night before his execution; Osip Mandelstam scribbled poems in the Gulag; Anne Bradstreet wrote passionate poems of love for her husband in early America; Natalie Diaz today writes what she calls her “postcolonial love poems” to her partner.

Poetry travels with us, meets us where we are, leads us to the next steps. In my own life, poetry has been a constant companion. I have written poems in my very darkest and in my happiest moments. And so, here are, I think, some of the main purposes and benefits and delights of poetry:

The Purpose of Poetry: Attention

Unlike prose, poetry asks us to pay attention to language not just sentence by sentence or even word by word, but syllable by syllable, sound by sound. The very rhythms and the music of poetry demand that we listen, that we open our senses, and become aware of how we take meaning into our bodies. Similarly, poetry’s shorter lines and the the pauses that are built into the line breaks  slow us down. Poetry asks us not to jump ahead but to stay with the experience of reading. It invites presence.

This slowing down, this act of attention is, as the philosopher Simone Weil says, a sacred act: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love… Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”

When we train our mind to pay attention, as a poem helps us do, we naturally enter into a sacred relationship, what another philosopher, Martin Buber, calls the “I-Thou” relationship.

The Purpose of Poetry: Connection

Attention naturally leads to connection. As we pay attention to language, for example, we see that language takes on meaning in connection to tradition, perception, experience.

A word means something different in relation to other words; rhythms are formed only in relation to other rhythms and sounds. Form and content cannot be separated in a poem. A poem means exactly what it says in the form it is written. It can be shorthand to talk about the form and the content of a piece of writing, but in reality form and content cannot be separated; form is content and content is form. This is similar to the mind-body dichotomy. It can be helpful to talk about mind and body as separate, but, in fact, science and our own perception teach us that mind and body are just words pointing to parts of our experience that, in fact, are inextricable from each other.

Similarly, the meaning of a poem comes from the relationships formed between the lived world, the words on the page, their relationship to each other, and the reader herself. The craft of reading and writing poetry is inextricable from the practice.

The Purpose of Poetry: New Possibilities

And through the ways a poem teaches us to stay connected, new possibilities arise. The very close attention that a poem demands leads to greater and greater insight. The more we pay attention, the more respect and wonder we have. We are led, as Weil says, to prayer. Even if what we pay attention to is difficult, we see the connection between the particular and the numinous, the small and the large, what we can know and what we cannot.

As we pay attention to relationship, we come to pay attention as well to the openings between things, between words, that space of silence, that space of mystery and possibility. In a poem about poetry itself, Emily Dickinson wrote: “I dwell in Possibility –/ A fairer House than Prose – / More numerous of Windows – /Superior – for Doors –” Poetry opens windows and doors to spaciousness. In that more open space, new possibilities arise.

The Purpose of Poetry: Healing and Wisdom

This space of possibility is the space of creative energy itself, of that sacred spark. Poetry guides us to this space through the attention that it invites. It’s important to note that this attention is not the same attention of that of the analytical left brain.

We’re not going into a poem and inspecting it under a microscope. High school English classes sometimes destroy poetry for students by doing tedious, improbably close readings. It’s as if the class were in the presence of a wonderful falcon and, instead of watching it fly, instead pinned it down, cut it open, dissected, and killed the bird. But in staying with the poem—on the poem’s own terms—we get out of the left brain and into the creative imaginative space of the right brain. This is also the space of dream, of the subconscious, of myth, of spirit. And that space is also the space where change happens.

This is the space of our most primal cry—grief, trauma, physical pain all are part of this space and are often outside of language. It is also the space of our greatest joy, our sexual desire, our love, and the space of the sacred itself, of mysticism and awe. Interestingly, our most heightened experiences take us outside of language. And paradoxically, the very close attention to language that poetry creates brings us into the non-verbal, the space between words, the wisdom of the non-verbal.

“Tell the truth but tell it slant,” Emily Dickinson also famously wrote. Often the very slantness of a poem can get to the truth more accurately. All writing is a process of discovery, but especially poetry. The very form itself allows us to let go of our preconceived ways of saying or thinking about things and try new forms, new meanings. We learn through our own reading and writing processes.

In my own life, my poems were a place to express my trauma story before I had a conscious understanding of it. They were a place to heal. They are also a place to encounter the sacred, to connect with what matters, to reconnect with beauty, meaning, joy. 200 years ago, in his Defense of Poetry, Shelley famously called poets the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” This may sound grandiose, but it remains true that though poets may still largely be unacknowledged, through the act of poetry, we reconfigure our world; we create new worlds.

It can feel far-fetched to say that reading or writing a poem has anything to do with, let’s say, the climate crisis, but from my own experience as an activist and talking to my friends who do full-time activism, what we need is not new technology, but a cultural shift, new ways of seeing and perceiving, the very things that poetry helps us do. You might look around you and think: where’s the evidence of that? From the outside in, it might sound like nonsense. But when we get inside the space of a poem, when we get inside the creative act, inside our own creative energy, amazing new possibilities open. We see, and more importantly experience, the transformative power of poetry.

This transformative power is in many ways similar to the transformative power of mindfulness itself: the very ways that poetry helps us pay attention, make connections, and open into the space between things. Poetry and mindfulness both bring us to the sacred emptiness and silence that lead to transformative change. In fact, all sacred traditions bring us to this space; whether it’s the Jewish wedding that I went to this weekend or the Muslim funeral, poetry like all spiritual traditions draws us into the space of meaning and creative power.

What about you? What have your experiences with poetry been like? What is the purpose of poetry for you?

Please enjoy my writing prompts below and please leave a comment. I love to hear from you. And I encourage you to try one of my meditations before writing. You can download those in my free resource library.

If you want to go deeper with your own poetry writing, I’d love to see you in my upcoming Poetry of Attention Course. The course is designed to fit any schedule and is for poets and non-poets of any level. 

 

Writing Prompts: The Purpose of Poetry