I spend quite a bit of time thinking about poetry and wondering why it has so fully captured my attention. I also ask myself if it is a worthy vocation. Will it make any difference? Does it need to make a difference? Is reading or writing or thinking about poetry a valuable way to spend one's time? I find I am often quite conflicted in my answers. I wonder why I didn't fall in love with Bio-Chemistry or Agriculture or some other field with empirical, measurable, tangible outcomes. But poetry it is.
Here is the start of a list of what I think poetry (and literature) does that is worth valuing:
1. Pays attention to the world and encourages us to pay attention as well.
2. Praises & celebrates life
3. Acts as a witness
4. Portrays different perspectives
5. Challenges us to think deeply
6. Plays with language in a way that can be entertaining and delightful
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Poetry. Literature. Conversation. Life.
Welcome from Amy D. Unsworth
Language, Literature, Learning & Life.
Topics of Thought
- Cancer: Chemo and Coping (25)
- Contemplation: A Series (2)
- Flint Hills Life (24)
- Give Back (9)
- Leavenworth Life (6)
- Literature: Reading and Theory (18)
- Misc. Me-Me's (12)
- Pages Rustle: Poem and Poet (8)
- Poetry: Poems and Drafts (16)
- Poetry: On Poems and their Poets (20)
- Poetry: Poems and Drafts (5)
- Poetry: Publishing and Presentations (45)
- Poetry: Small Poems (by others) (7)
- Poetry: Writing Life (75)
- The Life the Heart Selects: Pleasures and Photos (40)
- What Now? (2)
- Year's End: New Year's Poems (3)
A few notes:
Schedule a Reading:
Amy's Written Work: Elsewhere on the Web
- The Pedestal Magazine: A Day Beginning and Ending in Crows (poem)
- The Pedestal Magazine: (Poetry Review)
- Blackbird: (Poetry Review)
- Poems Niederngasse: From the Tool Box (Nine Essays)
- Three Candles Journal: (Five Reviews)
- Noted on the Gazebo: Drift (poem)
- Poems Niederngasse:Editor's Issue (poems)
- IBPC: The Black Warrior Interview (Interviewer)
- The New Pantagruel: (poems)
- Real Simple: Your Words (Reader Letter)
- The Green Tricycle: Let-Down (poem)
Among Friends (Poet's Sites)
Where to Visit (and why)
Well Loved Poems
Visual Delights
Founts
Who's Been By?
For More Information or To Schedule a Reading:
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3 comments:
Hi Jilly,
It won't feed the children, that's for sure. But I feel that it does make me feel as if I am paying closer attention, and through that attention living more purposefully. (Of course there are plenty of other methods to achieve the same end, including many that involve religous beliefs.)
I guess it returns to the age-old questions of what should Art do & why do we value it? There is in the answers to this question something to do with "defining our humanity" (I think Scoplaw was talking about this) but that's too big of a question for right now.
But specifically, for you, Amy, what does poetry do for you? Can you articulate an answer? I don't think I can. I've tried. But in the end, nothing comes close to explaining my love for reading and writing of it.
While I was running today, I was thinking about the impermanence of things, specifically, of words, which bled into the larger meditation on the unreliability and/or instability of words. How I can use the word "mother" in a poem and any given reader will have his or her own individual instaneous visceral reaction to that word based on their own experience.
Good question. What does poetry do? Hmmmm.
It makes me feel less alone, for one thing.
It makes me hope, laugh, cry, despair--it moves me to emotion. It makes me think, sometimes deeply, sometimes abstractly, sometimes about the play of language, other times about the narrative, or the form.
And that is only a beginning of the list.
And I like the nuances that language can contain:
Hewn, chopped, carved, etched, scratched, engraved.
I think you touch on something essential when you mention "experience" and how it influences everything we read.
I guess I want to feel that there is experience behind the poem that I am reading, though not necessarily factual/empirical "truth" but some sense of human emotion (possibly a desire for the sublime?).
And yes, it is a shield against the impermanance, isn't it? It reflects our desire to create something that says "we were here," a luminescence that people will value when we are but ash and dust.
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