Daniela Naomi Molnar : part two

Why is poetry important?

Our culture inflicts so much violence on language and attention. Poetry (to build on Yusef Komunyakaa’s idea) is the caretaker of both.

In a culture in which language is shaped and eroded

by algorithms
by phone keyboards
by the sheer quantity of visual communication lobbed at our eyeballs, everyday
by the myriad, aggressive manifestations of consumerism therein
by the growing racket of human-made noise which erodes our capacity to listen

poets are a needed force.

I believe, too, that poetry is unique in its capacity to hold an almost infinite multiplicity of meanings simultaneously. In a culture obsessed with certainty, in which the violence of authority and authoritative statements is another type of violence done to language, this ambiguity is a much-needed balm. Poetry’s ambiguity allows us to “listen in strange ways,” in the words of Ross Gay, a type of listening that is fundamental to being fully human.

Because real art is always subversive, poetry can also (and in recent years, has) foreground the voices of the historically marginalized and oppressed. Poetry allows us to hear the voices of precarity and survivance, the voices of everything and everyone that cannot survive or thrive within a neoliberal ontology, which is to say, all “externalities” to profit.

This unprofitable (or anti-profitable) world is the necessary voice of poetry.