Some observations on Poetry

from a survey for Poetry Magazine

As a former subscriber to Poetry Magazine, I sometimes receive emails asking me to take a quick survey on why I no longer subscribe. Yesterday on a whim, I took one, and there, in question number 7, was a better explanation of why than I could have formulated myself:

Ignore that it’s one of those annoying “ranking” questions and just focus on the words. What’s missing?

That’s right: nowhere in this question do we see any mention of “beauty,” “transcendence,” “the soul,” “human flourishing,” “happiness,” “the good life,” or “the sublime.” There’s nothing about love, gratuity, or joy. The only possible “impacts” (ugh) of poetry in the world today have to do with personal or social development. In other words, poetry, at least according to Poetry Magazine, is a tool.

If I wasn’t already in love with poetry, seeing this list of options would completely turn me off the art form. It makes poetry look like a worse version of an undergraduate public speaking class. In this conception, poetry is either a self-help tool (provides an opportunity to explore challenging topics, inspires creativity and emotional expression) or a political tool (promotes social change). The least offensive option here, explores language and enhances cognitive function, sounds like jargon from an online educational scam that promises to make you a millionaire within 30 days or less (“Poetry makes you smarter!”).

Maybe good poetry does all these things (although I personally would refrain from using the hackneyed “impact” language to describe anything I love—poetry is no rotten tooth or ruinous meter!). But this whole question misses the truth about poetry: it is, above all, an attempt to pierce the veil, a hand flung out in the mist towards the divine in a hope that perhaps that divine will grasp it. That’s why we apply ourselves to the craft and devote ourselves to mastering the finicky art of prosody. That’s why we obsess over vowel sounds and batter out our brains against a stubborn rhyme: because if we can find the right sound, the right rhyme, we just might see God.

I haven’t read Poetry in some years. Perhaps they’re actually printing technically brilliant verses that draw us upward into the sublime, or offer astonishing insights into human nature, or give us brilliant, nuanced, dramatic portraits of statesmen, dictators, philosophers, and artists. But based on this survey, I doubt it.