When the Going Gets Tough, What Good is Poetry?

This is a question I’ve been asking myself a lot lately. I’ve been going through  what some people call “heavy stuff”, with some scary things that just keep being scary. I’ve not been able to pretend to be light-hearted, not in person, and not in my writing. I’ve been writing mostly prose, mostly first-person stuff that feels too much like confession and not enough like art. Trying to promote a book, trying to promote poetry in Redmond, all that stuff has felt extra hard lately when I wonder “What is the point of poetry?” It doesn’t pay the bills, it doesn’t cure cancer, it doesn’t do anything practical.

This is where I will propose that poetry can be more useful in dark times than prose. Poetry makes you focus on the art part of the language a lot harder. You can’t get away with sloppy language or unfettered messy emotion and trying to cram your own whole wild self into it is hard work. When my husband G was out running errands yesterday, he ran by Half-Price Books and found a copy of a Margaret Atwood microfiction chapbook called “Murder in the Dark,” published by a small Canadian press back in 1983. These microfictions are a bit like prose poems, a bit like very well-managed short-short stories, and Atwood manages to keep them hilarious, dark, and brilliant in the way that only she can. Reading her pieces allowed me to try a bit of her style of microfiction/prose poetry – which was an wonderful escape from my own mind. And the result was the first poem in a long time that I have written that I felt happy with. It felt like I had found me again, when I read Atwood’s pieces about, yes, murder, death, mostly not subjects normal people might feel cheerful about, I was just able to see things from a different enough perspective, to kind of see the humor, the light, again.

And it occurred to me that poetry can be not only an escape, but that ability to transform a moment of grief, or sorrow, or fear, into something more – something dark and dangerous, or light and airy, depending on the artist – is what makes poetry magic. It’s not the publishing, or the payment (God knows,) or the fame (ha ha) that makes being a writer of poetry worthwhile. It is this moment – a moment of enlightenment, a spark of laughter, maybe a rueful acknowledgement – that lets our minds and bodies and hearts heal.

This is why I’ve participated in anthologies that mean something to me – including the recently released Like One Anthology, an anthology for “The One Fund”  for the Boston Bombing victims, an anthology focused on positive, lighter poems rather than poems about the bombing event, an anthology meant to lift the spirit, edited by Deborah Finkelstein. It really is a delightful book, so run out and get a copy and know it will be money going to a good cause and money well spent on an entertaining and enlightening collection of poems. There have been other anthologies that I felt honored to be part of, like the Japanese anthology of nuclear protest after the Fukushima disaster, “Farewell to Nuclear, Welcome to Renewable Energy: A Collection of Poems” which was printed in both Japanese and English.

I don’t know if poetry can change the world, but I know it can change my outlook, and if it can do that for me, it can do that for others. It is beautiful, it is art, yes, it can be healing for the author, yes, it can have a message that might help someone somewhere, but there is enough magic in the act of writing (and reading) that makes it worth it, all by itself. I don’t know if Margaret Atwood was thinking, “there’s someone out there who is going to be feeling a little blue and writers-blocky in 2013 who needs this laugh and thought and sharpness” – when she wrote Murder in the Dark in 1983, but it was like a little dose of sorcery, enough to jolt my writing nerves back to writing like myself again. And who cares that I write? Maybe no one cares about what I write now, but maybe there is someone in 30 years who will need it. Who knows?