Beginnings

What is Poetry for?

This Substack page will be dedicated to thoughts on poetry, reviews, and conversations. We aim to update regularly (the ideal being weekly) and encourage comments and engagement below. We thought we would begin with a straightforward subject: what is the purpose of a poet/poetry in these times?

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John Glenday
'We must sleep with our eyes open. We must dream with our hands.’ (Octavio Paz)
Poetry is an antidote to three of the common ailments of perception. We can't write adequately unless we observe fully, with all our senses. So poetry refuses to let us ignore (when we refuse to see) or overlook (when we are too busy seeing one thing to notice another) and most important of all, it refuses to let us disregard (when we see something, but judge it to be of little worth). Poetry relies on detail, subtlety, precision and economy. To write well we must give our full attention to the world; we must treat it as if it was complex and endangered; fragile and beautiful.

Karen Solie
In a hard world, poetry can accompany us. In reading, we feel the presence of another mind. In writing, we extend our own, in all its idiosyncrasies of perception and interpretation, into the void in search of another. If done authentically, reading and writing can be acts of courage and generosity that affirm the continued existence of these values. And it's good, in times of extremity, to have something interesting to do. Writing a poem requires discipline and attention in order for the poem to be fully present for readers. The attention and discipline of creativity make us fully present to ourselves.

Don Paterson
God knows. But to be alive as a poet in the worst of times demands that we don’t duck the question. As I get older, I find myself turning to those who used poetry to ‘defend reality’, to speak the truths that the language was refusing to host elsewhere – and in the kind of poems that, once read, went on singing by themselves in the minds and hearts of their readers. A poem can be many things, but I am convinced the ‘bad poetry of the self’ has run its course. It is easy to write. It risks nothing. It has made no difference. In addressing a writing clique it has failed the reading public, whose concerns we once thought it our responsibility to voice. Now might be moment to apply for our old jobs back.

Kathleen Jamie
What are poets for? I fear such questions. They put me on the defensive, because even at this late stage I still hear ‘why bother?’ and ‘can’t you just get a job?’ Were I only a reader of poetry, not a writer, I could talk about it as a place of ‘redress’, as Seamus Heaney put it. A place where language isn’t being used to hector or diminish us, but where truth and enquiry can happen. A place where we are free of ‘the interpreted world’, in favour of an expanded one. But as one who tries to participate, I just feel shame. Why can’t I do it better?

Lesley Harrison
One of our primary functions must surely be to tend to language as matter and medium; to cultivate and extend the way in which it allows us to enter others’ minds and explore our own through the (real, physical) effort of wording what and how we think. But this is only half the task : I think, these days, there is a moral obligation to signal its limits, to leave its borders open. From Philosophical Investigations: ‘A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.’ The poem, the most concentrated form of language: ‘the locus of rupture and distance.’ (Celan).

Lisa Brockwell
To feel our feet upon the earth while we look up at the stars and wonder; to breathe, and know we are physical beings, conscious that we will die; to look outside ourselves at the world and try to name things, and communicate something of that world to each other. So much of what I stumble towards - so much of what I know is true about reading and writing poems - is there in Rilke’s Ninth Elegy: 'Here is the time for the sayable, here is its home.' I think that’s what a poem is for, and what a poet should be attempting and failing and attempting again.

Niall Campbell
Today, I believe the purpose of the poet is about re-discovering wonder. Or beauty. Or perhaps, grace. Or any of the words for that uncovering, after concentration and reflection, that the world is more than itself. It is rarely a spontaneous overflowing – much more often it is a hard-won revelation. I think that the rise in number of those writing poetry stems from a desire for this sensation. The digital world is lonely and sanitised, our relationship to the world grows ever more surface – but the poem, in its reading and writing, can be that a temporary bridge of air that reconnects us, even for a moment, to something hidden and rare.