Why poetry matters

    

    April is national poetry month. If you’re thinking “yeah, so what?”, you’ve got a lot of company. In 2012 the National Endowment for the Arts conducted a Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. According to an LA Times article, More than half of American adults read books for pleasure in 2012, “People reading poetry for pleasure has plunged in the last decade, dropping by 45%. Among adults who read books for pleasure, less than 7% now say they read poetry.”

    With less and less people reading poetry, why does poetry matter? In school we’re taught the basics of the English language. We learn to spell. We learn that sentences need to contain a subject and a predicate, begin with a capital letter and end with a predefined punctuation mark.  

    That’s all fine for daily conversation, writing notes and writing papers. But proper sentences are linear. What happens when what I want to express isn’t linear? What happens when I can’t find the word to describe something or the work that matches how I feel? What happens when there doesn’t seem to be a word for what I want to say?

    This is where poetry comes in. In poetry words and language are more than just tools, they become art. Poetry releases words from the linear confines of sentences and standard grammar. A noun can be a verb. An adjective or a verb can be a revelation. Poetry is painting with words.

      When words become paint they intertwine and the shading between them reveals what cannot be described in a single word. Poetry frees us from the limitations of language. Poetry can distill individual experience into something transpersonal that we can all identify with. Poetry is big enough to encompass death, birth and transitions in a page or a single stanza.

      When we read poetry we open ourselves to seeing the common and the extraordinary and ourselves in a new way. Poetry can push us to wrestle with big questions or invite us deeper into the mysterious. Reading poetry can open us to new ways to use words.

     My love of poetry began in high school. In honor of National Poetry Month, here’s one of mine:

Origin

I was behind where I stood and up ahead looking back.

-Susan Mitchell, Autobiography

For some unbeknownst purpose

I am an alien radio, tuned

to a largely forgotten frequency

of dead languages and ghost song

where my ancestors encryption

                                                lies broken.

                                                                        (Even after the cypher splintered,

                                                                        I couldn’t crack the code.)

I want to say the world exiled me

but I was born this way, born into

a friction house where mother’s

Mormon devotion scraped against

father’s atheism and I believed

in neither.

                       

                                                                        (I’ve watched the monsters

                                                                        wear gods other face.)

                       

So what is the origin of exile?

Past lives, past lies competing

with the aura’s aria to sculpt

personality. It’s a wonder

I can navigate around

the furniture let alone remember

my name.

                                                                        (The name my parents gave me

                                                                        belongs to a different life.)

The tripwire stretched taut between

belonging and ownership finds me

lacking in possessions and earmarked

a leftover, an extra part not accounted

for in the assembly instructions,

                                                choking hazard.  

                       

(What if I’ve mistaken birth

for beginning, transposed

inception and intention?

Then my origin is an epilogue.)

      April 30 is Poem in Your Pocket Day. Consider selecting a poem, carrying it with you and sharing it friends, check out clerks and the others you met that day. In the words of Patti Smith, "Remember we are mortal, but poetry is not."