Coda Q:
What do you need poetry for?
Short
Answer: Writing poetry
is a way to process. The constraints are tools and frames for seeing in
manageable size bits.
Long
Answer: With poetry as
folk medicine it can try to treat many things. A need to connect, to speak up
and out, to educate, to frustrate, to calm, to make beauty, to break beauty, to
narrate differently, to sort out ideas, to make a thing, to make fame or
immortality. (Though, I’ve never believed in the last 2.)
If delivered
well, and the right randomness to the right moment, it may make a pattern
discernible somewhere else or to someone else. It’s a way to publicly speak and
build a like-minded community. It provides closure and control to state
something which gives permission to let go. A book as a casket for thought and
all that. Or poem as a urn.
But what do
I need of it? Maybe nothing? “Necessity is an individual sport” said Matt Wiele. But an individual is in constant
change. What do I need now?
And is
poetry the best route or the practiced route? Real solutions can be self-talk,
frank dialogue, direct action, following one line of thought deep and long,
medicine, to retrain thinking to not gaslight oneself in solitude, to learn
physical skills, exercise, listening instead of speaking, confronting issues
within and without. Poetry can be like slacktivsm. Or a start, rather than an
end. A way to question, not with answers in hand, or to question to question,
but to get somewhere.
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