Why is poetry important?
Poetry is important because it has sparked critical and creative thought about the language and rhetorical conventions that shape our thinking. For instance, I argue in my work on Amiri Baraka’s “Black Communications Project” that Baraka often used poetry to anatomize and critique liberal aesthetic norms which have historically invalidated necessary expressions of anger or racially-specific political convictions within art and public discourse. Poetry plays with and calls into question the social uses of verbal materials that, putting aside more profound material (economic) considerations, I believe most determine our thoughts, interpersonal relationships, and cultural attitudes. Because poetry is so often self-reflexively engaged with its own powers of representation and communication, it's the medium that is closest to what remains the primary substrate of our social experience: words.
The effects that poems actually have in the world/word, of course, vary. I agree with Erica Hunt’s conclusion to her excellent and important “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics” (1988), in which Hunt writes that “writing itself cannot enlarge the body of opposition to the New Wars, it only enhances our capacity to strategically read our condition more critically and creatively in order to interrupt and to join.” Then again, if enhancing our “capacity” to interrupt and to join isn’t enough to qualify as enlarging opposition to the New Wars (by which Hunt means the post-WWII era of neoliberal colonial violence and social control), I don’t know what is.
For me personally, poetry is also important because writing it momentarily takes me out of the temporality and mindset of self-commodification demanded by my daily efforts to continue to have an income, let alone a career, in academia. Without this alternative, I think I would be even more deformed by the soul-sucking requirements of the academic job market. I feel that, at its best, poetry provides this sort of respite for others, too.
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