S. T. Brant : part four

Why is poetry important?

It isn’t, which is why it is. I’ll divide my answer to this in a pretty banal dichotomy: to those that consider literature Life and those that don’t. For the latter, if poetry has any importance at all, it’s minor- which could still be admitting to some importance, sure, but the qualities that make it important are different than what make it important to other people and maybe even what the writers thought would be the important chords they played. I think if poetry can be even the least important and serve as a distraction from life and a path inward, then it has already done enough- and in fact is likely more crucial than is outwardly acknowledged. Poetry sneaks up on you. Reading may never be their seminal recreation, it may be a chore, it may not be something they spend their whole day and night contemplating, and they may not spend all their time in bookstores, or consider visiting all the bookstores in the places they travel to vacation-worthy: in which case, poetry isn’t Important, but it can still be important. In those cases, poetry does have to be sneaky; it has little time to operate, and in that time it has to garden quickly: something in it needs to take root, it needs to leave something within that invites that person back, back within, where maybe they don’t spend much time, and invite them to investigate, to get to know that dark interior. But that time in solitude, when someone spends time with themselves in a part of themselves unfamiliar and learns to be alone, kicking open a new dimension to themselves- this poetry can do and is why it’s important. Letting someone get to know themselves better and become a richer character. For those that deem literature Life- what’s to say? The model of Important is Poetry. I don’t like the whole ‘what can poetry do? ‘how necessary is poetry?’ ‘is poetry dead?’ yada, yada, yada. It’s always Nothing/Everything; No/Yes; Yes/No. The words and I are often in strife, which is probably as it should be, because they don’t need me, and the contest is to prove them wrong and force some admission on their end that I made some inroads into what’s possible with language that even they didn’t anticipate, when all is said and done. But Poetry is important in that regard to me and me only because that’s the battle. Maybe if I say the right thing and get the idea right and the poem comes out as I have a vision of it, then maybe it can become important to someone for whom poetry isn’t generally important, or even maybe to someone for whom poetry is life. But I really only care about how important Poetry is to me and make no bones about convincing others. Even with my students, my goal isn’t to lecture them into assent, but to, sneakily, by the end, hopefully have demonstrated, whether through example or some blossom blasting through the dry season of the year, that there’s power in moving and being moved. I probably didn’t answer this question well. It’s hard. I’ve rambled and landed back at the beginning that it’s important to me. There’s a million anecdotes of it being meaningful in the world and being nothing in the world, and I think that’s how it should be. It’s the shadow-king.