What Poetry Can('t) Do

The limits of magic

“I don’t have rent but I wrote you this sestina!”

There’s a poem by Haki Madhubuti that appears in the preface of his “Poet’s Handbook” at the end of his collection Run Toward Fear. I think about it a lot.

Poetry will not stop or delay wars, will not erase rape
from the landscape,
will not cease murder or eliminate poverty, hunger or
excruciating fear. Poems do not command armies, run
school systems or manage money. Poetry is not
intimately involved in the education of psychologists,
physicians or smiling politicians.

In this universe
the magic the beauty the willful art of explaining
the world & you;
the timeless the unread the unstoppable fixation
with language & ideas;
the visionary the satisfiable equalizer screaming for
the vitality of dreams interrupting false calm
demanding fairness and a new new world are the
poets and their poems.

Poetry is the wellspring of tradition, the bleeding
connector to yesterdays and the free passport to futures.
Poems bind people to language, link generations to
each other and introduce cultures to cultures.
Poetry, if given the eye and ear, can bring memories,
issue in laughter, rain in beauty and cure ignorance.
Language in the context of the working poem can
raise the mindset of entire civilizations, speak to two
year olds and render some of us wise.
To be touched by living poetry can only make us better people.
The determined force of any age is the poem, old as
ideas and as lifegiving as active lovers. A part of any
answer is in the rhythm of the people; their heartbeat
comes urgently in two universal forms, music and poetry.
for the reader for the quiet seeker
for the many willing to sacrifice one syllable
mumblings and easy conclusions
poetry
can be that gigantic river
that allows one to recognize
in the circle of fire
the center of life.

Although, I carry in me the messages of the second and third, unfortunately, when I think about this poem, I’m usually thinking about the first stanza. But that’s not a bad thing! Probably!

I think a lot about what poetry can’t do. It can’t open stubborn jars of pickles. It can’t do your taxes. Despite its advanced age, poetry can’t even get a driver’s license.

Perhaps I think about poetry’s failings a lot because I feel like a good deal of the energy of poets (in and outside of their poems) is the work of justifying our existence.¹ Poetry is everywhere², but if popular culture invokes poetry, it is often lampooning it as overly serious, self-absorbed, confusing and obnoxious. It is rarely a full-time profession and all the myriad schools and styles often means there’s a lot of passive aggression and jockeying for attention within the poetry-writing world.

But despite that, I STILL want to talk about the limits of poetry’s powers. Maybe I’ll figure out why by the time I finish.

Here are some trends:

1. Poetry as conscience-release-valve.
   Often we turn to poetry to make sense (or at least cope) with a terribly unjust world, our capricious gods and bosses, all the big bummers. That’s great! Just like I do with Madhubuti’s poem, I often find myself quoting poems (to only myself) when faced with certain big vibes.³

   
   But I also worry that (for me) it can become too easy to only manage my own discomfort at injustices big and small, personal and global, and have that be ALL the work I am able to do, the work of managing my discomfort. It’s important to pace ourselves, to take time to celebrate, rest, catharize. But if all I ever do is write a poem about my discomfort, maybe even share it and get lots-o’-likes, then at best it’s value neutral, at worst, exploitive, snake oil.
   

2. Poetry as a one-stop-shop.
   Along similar lines, my ennuis get triggered when I feel like the proportion of our energy relegated to bickering about style (both within and outside the poem) is outsized and performative. How much oxygen do we actually have to devote to squabbles over word choice⁴ or fashion? If poetry “will not cease murder or eliminate poverty” and if those are worthy things to strive for, then acting as if poetry is all you need is actively ignoring those and other Big Problems.
   
   Which is to say, I am a deeply silly person. Some of my daughter’s first common refrains were, “You didn’t read the room, Daddy,” and “I’m not in a very jokey mood!” But I am always working on the balance between what I am serious about and what warrants irreverence or tension-release or just a simple goof-about. However, the pressures of coolness for coolness’s sake, in any arena, must be met with skepticism and disdain.
   
   Is anyone actually advocating for poetry to be all we need? I doubt it, but when poets (or any artists) hold up the art form as holy, it is (unconsciously?) implied that poetry the culture, and by extension its prophets, are the ones who will be the single set of footprints in the sand, carrying you across beaches like all good saviors should.
   
   But poems won’t even help you move a couch you found on Craigslist.
   

3. Poetry as transcendence

   Maybe it’s blasphemous, but whenever I see someone absolutely freaking out over a poem, first, I feel ashamed that it doesn’t have that effect on me, and then, grumpy about how everyone is looking at the person speaking in tongues, writhing on the floor, and not the actual poem. Have poems made me cry? Yes. Have they changed my beliefs? Yes. Have they brought me closer to other readers? Yes. Have they made me tear out my hair and weep blood and get a neck tattoo of the poem in a swirly font? No.

   
   There’s this thing people do sometimes when they like something a lot: they want to share it and talk about it with someone else. That’s awesome and communal and I love doing that too. But then there are people who, for reasons private to them, see how making a big deal about liking something gets you attention.⁵ In live poetry readings, this can sometimes mean making all kinds of wild sounds and gesticulations. My own personal neurotype doesn’t seem to make decisions very quickly about whether I like something — it needs as much data as possible before my mouth will go “I like!” And I am not against wild sounds and gesticulations per se, I just can’t process the piece fast enough to elicit those reactions even if I wanted to make them.
   
   This is maybe most easily illustrated by going to any live performance of Shakespeare. The audible guffawing at the bon mots and Elizabethan repartee is unbearable to me. People making it clear that they get it, they get the joke or the reference, and they want us all to know how cultured they are.
   
   I’m not saying that all or even most of the people who go apeshit over a poem are lying about it (some, yes, definitely). I think poetry can be a great place to bring your wild, celebratory energy. Don’t let my slow processing speed ruin your fun times. But also, I am suspicious (jealous?) that poetry can sometimes make your whole face explode and that maybe your big reactions are less about the poem and more about people seeing you as someone who experiences poetry on a level they can never truly achieve.

I feel like I’m being terribly vague. In part, I’m trying not to start shit with anyone. But also, in case it’s unclear, I am uneasy around some of the cultural presentations of poetry (not so much with individual poems). The in-crowds, the in-demands, the in-fighting, the in-testines (that’s where poopoo is made). So much poor treatment of people arises from the bottomless suckhole of coolness, the faceless hand of the market choosing who its next top model will be.

But just as in Haki Madhubuti’s poem, poetry is mostly a force of good. In part, this is because anyone who would use it as a means to oppress, who would say they know what real poetry is, who say they own it and you have to buy it from them, those people are still mortals, individuals, and they can never have control over the words that sing inside all of us. I’d like to see them try!

1. This isn’t an issue just for poetry. I was listening to an excellent audio book about wasps (not WASPs) and the author was compelled to spend much of the book defending wasps or ginning up a tongue-in-cheek rivalry against bees. It was a little frustrating as a listener: I was consuming the book, so I didn’t need convincing that wasps were cool. Just tell me the cool wasp stuff!

However, as someone outside of the small wasp biologist community, I am not inundated with fear-mongering media stories about murder hornets or family members asking me how to avoid yellow jacket stings or seeing all the meager funding going toward bee research. The author clearly spends her whole life bathed in that frustrating world, sapping her good wasp-studying energy.

Maybe what I’m saying is only D-list poets like me care about what poetry can’t do - but here we are!

2. “I mean to tell you that everywhere I go/I hear us singing to each other.” from “On Kindness” by Aracelis Girmay.

3. Whenever I lose someone, or someone is searching for a poem about loss, I think first about Jack Gilbert’s “Michiko Dead,” where grief becomes a heavy box that can only be carried by the coordination of which muscles will be doing the majority of the lifting at any given moment, “so that/he can go on without ever putting the box down.” I also have begun thinking about this poem whenever I am moving a particularly heavy box, which might also be helping me from throwing out my back. So that’s two things poetry can do!

4. Squabbles over racist word choice or plagiarism, eg, probably deserve more oxygen than, say, grammar or metaphor.

5. It reminds me of how sometimes in birding communities, there’s somebody who will report seeing a very rare bird just for the high they feel when other birders are like “you saw that, wowee!” So sometimes people work very hard to find super rare birds and sometimes people just lie and say they saw an ivory billed woodpecker just for the attention. Either way, it’s not about the birds.