This is a follow-up to my last post, “Indeed, Why Poetry?” which was a response to Daniel Halpern’s essay, “A Few Questions for Poetry,” that began with the mother of all questions: “Why poetry?” I don’t mean to start an argument, but I thought I ought to offer a few more answers to that question and give a few examples. So here goes:
- Just for fun: consider the ludic forms like the limerick or light verse
- To poke fun at all the serious poets who worry that poetry is becoming extinct: read some Dada
- To get laid: if you can’t make a buck, write a sonnet
- To rant: sometimes poets just need to complain
- To struggle with your soul: try Dante, Petrarch, Milton to name a few
- To complain about not getting laid and then struggle with your soul: definitely Petrarch, maybe John Berryman, and about a million others
- To focus your mind: any meditative poetry (any poetry)
- To focus attention on something that usually goes unnoticed: haiku
- To explore language in new combinations and push meaning: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, Surrealists, among many others.
- To make a political point: see e. e. cummings, Amiri Baraka, Poets Against the Vietnam War, etc.
- To praise a person, idea, or object: odes or elegies
- To save the planet: eco-poetry
- To come to terms with a work of art: ekphrastic poetry
- To celebrate being alive
- To contemplate death
- To celebrate and explore your culture or identity
- For the challenge of saying exactly what you meant to say in as few words as possible
- For the discovery of saying what you never expected to say
- Because you’re tired of inane tweets
- Because you have a typewriter, fresh ribbon, paper, and time on your hands
Thanks for that last one to the guy in the coffee shop in Orange City, Iowa, who wrote me an impromptu poem one morning a couple of summers ago. I’m cheating a little with that, since he did make a buck or two tip out of that deal, but I suspect he did it less for the money than to while away the time and to rise to the challenge of composing a decent poem on the spur of the moment. He also ran a poetry series, though we couldn’t stay in town for that, and if I remember right, he was involved with a small literary magazine or two. Once poets get the bug, the main answer to the question “Why poetry?” often seems to be “Because poetry.”
The list above is hardly exhaustive, and I suspect there are many more reasons to write or read a poem: as many as there are moments in a day, days in a life, and different experiences that fill those moments. There’s nothing wrong with using a poem to commemorate an important life event or even with trying to earn a few dollars writing poems. My point has been that to describe poetry only in those terms is to limit it, and that commercial success is the wrong criterion to use to judge its worth. Poetry is like eating or breathing. Most people don’t earn a living doing either activity, yet we could not live without them.
Poetry is serious and poetry is frivolous. It can be both simultaneously, and it can be so many other things. It can be written for any of the reasons listed above and more, or for any combination of reasons. So I will end with Halpern’s question: “Why poetry?”
I’ve given twenty answers — what are yours?
Kendall Dunkelberg 