-
I have often wondered about the point of poetry, even after studying it for years. So frequently, I’ve opened the book to read, or I’ve set my pen on paper to write, and I’ve stopped short only to ask myself a question: what is the point of this? And I think that Professor Perl’s essay gets to the heart of this question, the utility of poetry. In her essay, she writes that poetry allows her to “reveal a memory by narrowing it to a few telling details, to portray a family member by focusing on a seemingly minor moment, to use something small to say something big” (130). Like Professor Perl, I too have used language as a means of understanding my life–an exercise in focusing, narrowing, and speaking. And for me, this has always been something of a compulsion: I have always written things down, recorded the strange events swirling around me–secretly, tucked away inside a notebook.
What I find most interesting about Professor Perl’s essay is the way that she makes a connection between secrecy and poetry, the compulsion to write things down in private. Because it’s true; there is an element of conspiracy to poetry, between the reader and the writer–a telling of secrets. “I want to let you in on something,” the poet seems to say. “This is the way the world is, this is the way I see it.” Or, sometimes more emphatically: “This is how it ought to be.” And often there is a thread of pain running through this process. As the poet negotiates with this pain, she also encounters her own capacities for bravery: “[the poems] explore moments from my past,” Professor Perl writes, moments that, “with one exception, were hard to live with, moments that called for clarity and understanding” (130). Within pain and discomfort, a need for truth arises, and out of this need for truth, a new understanding of the self starts to take form.
And so to think back to my initial question, Professor’s Perl’s essay seems to suggest that the utility for poetry lies in its ability to help me “[craft] my own knowledge of what [is] happening around me” (130). It’s a way of apprehending the world, a way of engaging with the great mysteries of being alive–the pain and pleasure, the difficult and the effortless. As we put the pen to paper, we drop deeper into the secrecy and mystery of of who we are as lovers, thinkers–as human beings unfolding through revelation. In the midst of this revelation, the world starts to take form in all its complexity and beauty; and against this backdrop, the self emerges through the art of writing.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.