What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
Like all art forms poetry can convey emotion, commemorate history, expose injustice, overcome problems, connect with spirituality, facilitate understanding, but poetry, the oldest, and the most flexible and artistic of written forms, with origins in spoken and sung verse, does it better and more succinctly. It helps us understand and make sense of the world and our lives, can cause us to question, in a non-didactic way,
Poetry reveals the beauty and potential of language by challenging syntax and making full use of the flowers of rhetoric. It is language at its most creative. It is for this reason poetry is often used on state occasions, at funerals, weddings, in war etc. It keeps people going when other mediums fail, not least because it also facilitates being memorised, having origins as a mnemonic device. It also shapes us. It is a wisdom language, multi-layered and lending itself to explore injustices and questions of a spiritual nature, or politics, environment, love and personal lives. Finally, poetry is highly musical, and sometimes it is just the enjoyment of the word and image.
Scientists have proved that reading or listening to poetry causes parts of the brain linked to our resting states, the posterior cingulate cortex and medial temporal lobes, to light up. Poetry more than any other art form shows and gives us ways to understand and make sense of ourselves and the universe.
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