What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
Perhaps what poetry does best is draw language out of mystery and vice-versa into illumination as distilled, compact moments of clarity. And since language is important to us, a large part of who we are remains ever possible and worthy in poetry. In poetry, in those impulses to disassemble our days into shapes, features, categories, knowledges that can help us make sense of things--we are alive and mysterious. And the difficulties of confessing our longing to translate such things, feelings, the meagre pacificity of our dreams--are not mere vanity or luxury. Poetry isn’t a thing that will just capitulate to some reductive utility or meaninglessness. Perhaps we can’t know fully how poetry does what only poetry can do. It is important for us to have ambiguity in our lives, that we can achieve more possibility with the generosities and troubles that have come before us. But poetry reminds us that for our sake, things remain possible. Through specificity, the ever-shifting contours of our own lives invite poetry, which is a kind of joy in life--to remain ours. That is, we are held in something outside of what is monetizable. We escape a kind of material destruction daily. Because it cannot be commercialized, poetry invites us to hold possibility as part (and simultaneously apart) of the cosmic-scale complexities that compose our individual lives. That we are able to daily encounter--even momentarily--such things in poetry means that we exceed the bounds of their temporality. And we triumph in these moments. The best in us triumphs. That is the microcosmic potentiality of poetry.
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