What do you get out of poetry?

why poetry books

Brandon Wint asked on twitter: What do you get out of reading a poetry collection?

(I paraphrase, he said it better.

And then my electricity cut out.

Like literally. He can blow my mind with his compassion and beauty-seeking, but I mean the power grid. Sigh. One more demerit point to add to the day, to gritty weepy eyes of another day of wildfire smoke. Well, maybe that’s it. The day is not on probation yet. At least the pinched nerve of my back has released. My body isn’t acting as particularly bellicose ballast. And rain is coming.

"The sun coming through the window is washed by last night’s storm. Light must be washed to be at its best, and rain washes it, even when it rains at night."

Kelsey Andrews in Big Sky Falling (Ronsdale, 2021)

I’ve cultivated a taste for logical arguments but I love a good ramble in the rain.

A human being is mostly just water with a sense of purpose.

Thomas Wharton in The Book of Rain (Random House, 2023)

the girl gathers what she does not know into noise

Selina Boan in Undoing Hours (Nightwood Editions, 2021)

Singleminded is efficient but the irrelevant is where new growth comes from. I am drawn to what I do not understand. Curiosity feeds life force. Which comes first, safety or curiosity?

“Compassion is more creative than contempt. Forgiveness – at its best – seeks to make space for surprise and the unexpected.”

Pádraig Ó. Tuama in Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022)

“The shape of his life was predestined by darkness. The darkness always cedes to the light, and he always emerges—thus far, at least.”

Jude Sierra in A Tiny Piece of Something Greater (Interlude, 2018)

Walking and poetry can be means to the end of being present.

“It didn’t make sense in her head, but it did down in her stomach.”

Becky Chambers in a closed and common orbit (Hodder Books, 2015)

Poetry is a means to work yourself out. Directly and indirectly at once. Poetry isn’t (necessarily) in your face and in your space but gives breathing room to let you what what is.

See/feel /what your body is/telling /you. /Stay there. //Feel that opening.

Leslie Roach in Finish this Sentence (Mawenzi House, 2020)

Walking is a companion of digestion, reflection, healing, health and many other things including poetry.

“The beginning is never the beginning,”

Nnedi Okorafor Akata Warrior, The Nsibidi Scripts Book 2 (Viking, 2017)

Recently I pushed myself more towards novels and non-fiction for the sake of pushing my own comfort zone, then quickly became a completist of four novelists. I’ve found some that are as poetic as poetry. Nnedi Okorafor, Becky Chambers, and Angeline Boulley. These three ladies knock me back on my heels.

In poetry there’s a plotlessness. But pressured direection. There’s a heady rush of sounds. What if what I was looking for all along is insight on how to exist?

But to circle back to the core, Why poetry?

The more you do something you deeper you get, the more data there is to see one thing in relation to other things.

Why poetry? It’s not the first time I’ve been asked. A couple friends keep asking me, baffled that I would want more. Like my MIL on seeing my Amazon gift list for Christmas said, no we’ve given you books before.

Poetry isn’t commodity cheese. It isn’t a surrogate for pink wall insulation. There are ideas in one book that isn’t in another. In one poem that no other poems has. There is beauty and density unlike prosaic conversations or stories.

There’s the possibility that someone who structurally is different (by nation, gender spectrum spots, generation, melanin, travel or ability) or comparable in exteriors and contexts but unknown to me, is ahead of me in comparable experience and can give me insights to understand my impasses.

There’s community in there being thousands of people doing the same thing, like marvelling in a market as a farmer at how many farmers there must be each in their isolated fields. We can learn from each other, see techniques and effects. But that’s practical & poetry is not centred necessarily on the practical.

Poetry sometimes seems an ineffective workaround for intractable obstacles. Told you are fine therefore not allowed to seek help? Dismissed as imaginative? Told you are frankly wrong in your perceptions and expressions? Poetry can be a bunker to safely explore who you could be and work out for yourself what walls are where and why.

Poetry makes do and splendidly. It is not elegant as a millipede but then what is? We make abstract metalwork with words. We obliquely aim. We affirm. We assert. We admit. We reassure. We resume the struggle.

We delight despite.

“This afternoon, you believe another nap will solve all your life problems. //When everyone knows naps are better suited for tackling geopolitics.”

Chen Chen in Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (BOA, 2022)

Poetry shakes up the expected trajectory. Poetry is irreverent to all our traumas. Poetry doesn’t have to take itself so seriously. Poetry pays attention. Like this short poem, “Run’:

Realizing I’m weeks late, we run
to the pharmacy, five minutes before closing
to buy a test. The cashier asks if we want her
to double-bag it, and you say 
No-
You say,

That’s what I 
should have done.

Hollay Ghadery in Rebellion Box (Radiant Press, 2023)

Poetry splits you out of your scanning mode, your monitoring for change mode and presents change.

Like the poem “Heron” by James Hawes in Breakfast with Herons (Mansfield, 2019) poetry draws us into a present, word by word.

A heron 
sails

across

the lake

I clatter

below

in my 
rowboat

Language is our seventh sense. We grope through it to find something or someone not like us so we can find alternative ways of being. Not plaster cast or bronze cast but ways that are still fluid and open in a way poetry can be. Ways that are still forming and deforming, re-forming and reforming in real speed. “a threaded language for every future” as rob mclennan put it in Poems for a Return to the World (Rose Garden Press, 2022)

Poetry can be an open(ing) mind. Poetry can be non-judgmental. It can be the secret side of a poet. Some poets writing about peace and joy are writing that into being and actually volatile and snippy. Some writing of grief are venting that so they can be buoyant in their external life. Some have poetry as the ying to their yang. Some the reverse and some put their complete self onto the page, or at least more proportionally even if not every detail. Poetry alone gives only part of the picture.

Getting to meet or know the poet completes more of the poetry. Is the poetry a hook of whimsy or burying the lede of resentment?

It is a fascinating thing to meet a poet after you’ve read them. Does the poetry run ahead of them towards where they are going? Does the poetry act as a closure, a burial of a past self? Is it a reclamation and resumption of hopes set aside?

“each epoch dreams the one to follow”

Jorie Graham, in fast (Ecco, 2017)

Our poetry needs to process stuff.

Constantly, lilies, starlings, pickles, special sauce, cadence, cadavers,
hand of God, capitalist manifesto, buffalo wings, angels, Coffee Mate, diction.

In recombination, silence is dull.

ryan fitzpatrick in Fake Math (Model, 2007/ reprint 2022)

It’s fascinating to watch the trajectory of poems or books over years and decades and see what they make public and how. What shifts? What is constant? What preoccupation disappears?

“there are times when you either save yourself or you don’t. It’s only up to you.”

Nnedi Okorafor in Noor (Daw, 2021)

A lot of my childhood reading was grab lots of books from auction sales so I was reading novels from the 1880s to the 1940s. And the poetry that was mixed in with it. I loved what I didn’t understand. Like how freely old novels mixed in without explanation Latin, French, Greek, German, or Italian.

Maybe that is part of the appeal of Poetry too, what is just beyond reach, stretch reads. I don’t want to be told what I already know and believe as that makes one of us redundant as the old saying goes. The old saying isn’t true. We need someone who hears and understands, speaks to our understanding.

That said, poetry is overlap and lack of overlap like Venn diagram amoebae. It moves. It dekes. It sometimes decks us.

Poetry is range, not respecting its own tension or its own humour, not confining itself but opening. Novels and arguments are about closure. Poetry is a cracking open a door or swinging it wide and walking somewhere new and bringing along whoever will come.