Can Poetry Matter?

Abstract

ESSAY Can Poetry Matter? Margaret Randall Margaret Randall isa feminist poet, writer, photographer, and social activist. She firstread the following essay at the Stir Poetry Festival inAlbuquerque, New Mexico, inSeptember 2008. The panel was organized by Albuquerque poet Lisa Gill,who titled it inhonor ofDana Gioia's 1991 essay by the same name. All poets and readers of poetry ask the question: Can poetry matter? We may pose thisquestion indifferent ways. We may ask ifpoetry canmatter in thewider world, if ithas thepower to change or even impact how we think or feel,what we believe, how we act, what we want for ourselves and others.Will it win my lover's heart?Keep my children safe?Can it reverse climate change, feed thehungry, effec tively support justice or reverse injustices, end war? Can poetry bring about lastingpeace? The question is not whether an individual poem or series of poems have been important to people throughout history. They have been, and powerfully. Such diverse poets as Sappho, Basho, Nguyen Du,1 Mevlana Rumi, C?sar Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, N?zim Hikmet, R. M. Rilke, Ho Chi Mirth,Walt Whitman, Czeslaw Milosz, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, and Joy Harjo are only a few of thosewhose work contin ues to change lives. The question is:Can poetry as process and product?as genre?matter? And ifso, how? We may ask more intimate questions about poetry, less ambitious perhaps but clearlymean ingful for our human community. For example: Can poetry nurture hope, can itmake us aware, teach, comfortus in times of grief,heal, inspire? What is poetry's responsibility to language? Can it revealmysteries, solve problems? Can it shock us to awareness and action, help us negotiate or persuade? What about oral tradition, everyday conversation, accent, inflection, color, risk? How does poetry enrich culture, help write history, retrieve or preserve memory, provide vision and perspective? Inwhat ways does itsupplement or perhaps even replace the lies thatcome down tous inhistorybooks written by thevictors, biography, essays, even the most thoughtfuljournalism? Poetrymattered to my friendCary Herz. Just a couple ofweeks before her death fromovarian cancer, she senta goodbye email toher friends.She ended hermessage with aMary Oliver poem, her parting gift. The poem was "Blackwater Woods," and some of the lines thatcontinue to sustainme are "Look, the trees/ are turning/ theirown bod ies / intopillars // of light... everything / Ihave ever learned //in my lifetime/ leadsme back to this: the fires/ and theblack riverof loss /whose other side // is salvation,whose meaning / none of us will ever know ..." The gift allowed us to breathe when we received it,and liftedus in recognitionwhen the rabbi read it at Cary's graveside. That poem con tinues to remind us of our friend, her gentle sensi bility,meaningful photography, fierce resistance, and gracious farewell.But itdoes much more than that.The lessons itholds move on many levels. I can think ofmany such instanceswhen a par ticularpoem or group ofpoems tempered sorrow, imbuedme with courage, flashed an unexpected image, or simply expressed an idea or emotion as nothing else could. Poems have been smuggled out of prisons, shared on battlefields, passed fromhand tohand and generation to generation, scratched on walls, written in diaries and recipe books, distributed on street corners, and carried cross-county by hobos riding the freighttrainsof the 1930s. They have inhabited public spaces and been whispered 201World Literature Today in ears, bringing otherwise indescribable events and people to life in stunningways. Their humor makes us laugh. Their truthcan take our breath away. Their concise complexity may transmit more, and more powerfully, than any piece of prose. Their ability to evoke emotion oftenmakes thempurveyors of experience inways thatmore expository writing cannot. It is obvious that poetry changes language. Cultural change influences what is permissible, what may be judged redundant or acceptable. What startles or reinvents later nestles securely in the lexicon. It is also clear that each new commu nicative tool?the telegraph, telephone, computer, cell phone, iPod, Blackberry, Kindle, and other constantly evolving electronic devices?can reju venate poetry. Chatting, twittering, and text mes saging push language toward brevity?urge us to say what we mean, and now. But they also do more. Typographical layout and rhythmemerge fromhow...