Poetry’s Just Desserts

(excerpted from an article in the Word Weaver,

the newsletter of the Writers Circle of Durham Region,

by way of an introduction to me and my site) 

The idea that poetry “deserves” an audience is one of those feel-good, lip-service things we hear whenever the press deigns to write about our poets and their work.

Nuts!

Poetry has no special claim just because it exists: as though poetry merits attention from the general reading public simply because it’s out there. In truth, poetry has long retreated from the centre of literary importance now commanded by fiction, and in the words of < xml="true" ns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" prefix="st1" namespace="">Toronto poet Rachel Zolfe, it is, “the dog of the art world.” As Claire Crichton put it in a recent McGill Daily column, the feeling among many readers is that “verse is now much too remote, too challenging, and too boring to be worth seeking out.”

When poetry works, it engages both the highest intellectual ability and the deepest emotional intensity to induce a uniquely physical response in its audience, a measure of dance’s rhythms, music’s spirit, film’s visuals, and a tug on the attention span that drags us out of the daily grind. When it works, it works because it speaks to the concerns of its audience.

But, even so, poetry doesn’t “deserve” that audience.

In fact, I’d put it the other way round; it’s the “audience” that’s deserving. And, if poets want to reach a wider and more discerning audience, they’ll have to earn it.

If poetry deserves anything, it’s more variety, more experiment, more respect for tradition and more inventive ways to make those traditions contemporary; communiating the sheer joy of writing to its audience. When poets widen the scope of their themes beyond the centre of their own lives and become more curious about the world at large, imagine the effect their poetry might have in drawing out the audience it might, then, “so richly deserve.”