NYT’s Room for Debate recently rounded up writers’ thoughts on why poetry matters. Sandra Beasley’s response (NYT):
“Does poetry matter?” Yes. No one watching a competitive slam by students would doubt it. Every elegy drafted for President Lincoln “mattered,” even the trite or amateurish ones. Elegies by Walt Whitman, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes and Stanley Kunitz mattered then, and have since endured.
What’s at question is poetry’s vaunted status above other artistic disciplines. “It’s poetry and power all the way!,” President Kennedy wrote to Robert Frost, after Frost spoke at his inauguration. He didn’t write “It’s ballet and power all the way!” and it’s probably for the same reason we do not have a Sculptor Laureate.
But Jonathan Farmer found some of the odes to poetics a tad overwrought:
David Biespel’s piece isn’t crappy. In fact, much of it is lovely. But he … gets a little carried away:
“Because poets have the highest faith that every word in a poem has value and implication and suggestion, a poem orients us in both our inner and outer existence.” Maybe I’m not a real poet (I’ve often entertained the possibility), but I have no such faith, high or otherwise. Sometimes, reading an individual poem, I’m able to gather enough conviction to start the generative chain of association that makes it so. I depend on poems to help me generate enough faith to find meaning, however provisionally. Most of the time, it doesn’t work, but I’d still like to be welcome in the church of poetry, even if I usually just stand at the back.
And yes, it does get pretty churchy in there. A little cultish sometimes, too. When [William] Logan writes, “We wouldn’t give people jobs as chemists or nuclear physicists without a decade of training, or make them pilots before they’d spent countless hours in a flight simulator,” I can’t help wondering whether he’s missed the obvious distinction or just become a little over-literal in his profession of the creed: poetry is a matter of life or death. After all, as William Carlos Williams wrote (and as poets love to quote) “men die miserably every day / for lack / or what is found there.” Even Williams, though, didn’t suggest that they literally die for lack of poetry (he was, after all, well acquainted with the actual causes of death).
The Dish 