In Defense of Poetry

A care package for anyone who wants it

One of the most rewarding things I’ve done this year has been attending monthly poetry workshops where participants bring a poem they’ve written and the group discusses and gives feedback and suggestions. This group has published poets and amateurs—someone that teaches poetry at a community college, someone who found poetry after the death of a child, retired individuals, and a few fellow 20-somethings, among others.

I’ve written on and off for about a decade now, largely on an as-needed basis. Most of which has lived in my notes app, occasionally a poem earning its way into a Google Doc to be edited. Poetry has been an outlet for processing loss, change, and sometimes joy. This year it has facilitated some connection to others and leaving these workshops always makes me want to write more freely and more honestly, and also edit my work more rigorously without being as precious about my early drafts.

And while people who know me well know that poetry is a part of how I engage with the world and myself, it’s not something I lead with—ever.

There are probably a couple of reasons, the first being when you say you write poetry, no one assumes you do it well.

Second, and maybe I’m projecting, but poetry seems to make people uncomfortable, and there’s a part of me that very much does not want people to feel uncomfortable.

And then, finally, since poetry is so seasonal for me, there are times when I much more identify with the craft than others. I’m not always writing, and definitely not always reading it. I often find it hard to slow down enough to read something that requires so much attention. I can find myself offended that the author would write something complex enough to require multiple readings. The nerve.

To some degree, part of the job of any artist ends up being educating people on their medium and the value it holds. Most, if not all, art forms are at times misunderstood or can feel inaccessible to people who haven’t had much exposure to them, and poetry is certainly no different. Exposure is often limited to off-putting writing assignments, Robin Williams movies, and declarations that rhyme with the word blue, leaving many people to view poetry as distant, indecipherable, or clichéd.

There are some people who have made strides in making poetry feel more reachable: Amanda Gorman captivated millions by her reading of “The Hill We Climb” at President Biden’s inauguration and Rupi Kaur has made poetry accessible and resonant to many through the vulnerability of telling her story through words and images. And there are poets who are also memoirists, essayists, and fiction writers who have captivated generations with their prose like Maya Angelou and Sylvia Plath, and in our generation Ocean Voung, which is never far or inseparable from their poetry.

Poetry is challenging. It can be uncomfortable, slow, and tedious. So here is my defense of poetry, and with it, maybe a defense of my tender poem-writing self, and hopefully a defense of those tender parts of you too.

In defense of poetry

As the Irish poet/philosopher David Whyte said, “Poetry is language against which you have no defenses.” Poetry is the art of telling the truth in a way that is so true that people can’t help to receive it.

Or more simply put by Micah Bourns at a gathering I heard him speak at years ago: poetry is about having the courage to tell the truth.

It’s about believing that the specificity of your experience is worth sharing and holds everything you need to connect with others. Or that the specificity of another’s experience is not so far from your own that it can’t add richness and connection to your experience in the world. In poetry, the specific and the universal are not separate from each other, but feed each other, creating an entry point into the experience of another, even if only for the briefest of moments.

Perhaps Elizabeth Alexander explains it best in the second half of Ars Poetica #100 I Believe:

“Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?”

Could that be the best defense of the arts possible: are we not of interest to each other?

Poetry is a bid for connection. It’s a reaching within to connect to self, a reaching out to the world to make sense of ourselves in it, and a reaching to connect with the joy, grief, complexity, and hope of others.

Poetry is a journey inward. It’s a process of moving through feelings, mediated by words, the end unknown from the beginning, in trust that the process alone is worth it. And sometimes the process can make sense of the senseless and give words to what had no words before.  

In his book My Bright Abyss, when speaking of psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain, Christian Wiman unfolds “Poetry has its uses for despair. It can carve a shape for pain; it can give one's loss a form and dimension that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting. It can do these things for one person, or it can do them for an entire culture.”

Poetry is also a muscle of observation. Like caring a camera around, it can invite you to pay closer attention to the details of the world around you—the way people you love say certain words, the angle of the shadows cast on your way home from work, how dust moves when you really look at it, things that now seem out place when you take a step back and look at them. The specificity of the time and places you exist in will become more and more alive the more time you spend looking.

Not all poetry will and should speak to everyone. The human experience is wide and varied, with poetry spanning time, culture, language, style, and subject matter.

Like someone visiting an art gallery wondering how long they should look at each painting before moving on, when reading a poem I’d answer the same way: stay as long as you want to, and, if you want to challenge yourself, then a little longer than that. Stay for as long as you are enjoying the piece. Stay for as long as you are still noticing new details. And when you have gotten from it what there is for you, however much or little that is, there’s no need for you to stay any longer.

Fall in love with poetry, a starter pack

Here’s a list of poems I’d recommend for the poetry curious. Most of them are relatively contemporary and from a wide range of perspectives. These are poems that are easy to understand, nourishing, emotive, and very human. A lot of these have touched me or given me better language for parts of the human experience. Take what’s helpful, what resonates, stay as long as you want to, and leave what does not.

I Don’t Want to be A Spice Store, Christian Wiman

The Tradition, Jericho Brown

With That Moon Language, Hafez

Phenomenal Woman, Maya Angelou

Immigrant Blues, Li Young-Lee

The Contract Says: We'd Like the Conversation to be Bilingual, Ada Limón

Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong, Ocean Vuong

Praying, Mary Oliver

Out Beyond Ideas, Rumi

In Between the Sun and the Moon, Pádraig Ó Tuama

Call Us, Amanda Gorman

Apollo, Elizabeth Alexandar

For the Dogs who Barked at Me on the Sidewalks in Connecticut, Hanif Abdurraqib

If you read any of these, I’d be interested in hearing about your experience, or if you have a poem you’ve loved over the years, I’m curious about what it is. Roses are red, violets are blue, if you want it, there’s something out there for you.