dean rader : part four

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

I think about this all the time as well. I’ve been thinking about it a great deal in relation to a book I worked on with Brian Clements and Alexandra Teague called Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, which Beacon published in 2017, on the fifth anniversary of the Sandy Hook Massacre. In that book, poetry offers an alternative mode of expression to journalism, statistics, and polemics. So often, public discourse is an example of language at its worst. Well, poetry is language at its best. It clarifies even though it does not explain.

William Stott argues that documentary photography (like that of Dorothea Lange) “educates our emotions.” I love that. I think poetry does something similar but maybe the opposite—it emotionalizes our intellect. It helps us feel through our thinking.

Poetry connects us to language, the tool we use for everything.