In Australia, August is Poetry Month. In the United States, it is celebrated in April, the spring month with its rich poetic association with spring. Apparently April was chosen, however, because it was the best month for promotion as well as for celebration. The imperatives to promote and to celebrate stand in some tension. Poets and lovers of poetry may long to return to the golden age of poetry early in the twentieth century when every newspaper and magazine regularly published poems and had poetry editors. The name of the poet laureate was known throughout the land. Poets, too, were seen to embody and to help shape the national spirit. Rupert Brooke in the early days of the 1914 war, for example, and Wilfred Owen at its ending. Or Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova in Russia, where Stalin feared poets despite their lack of battalions.
Today many people still write and read poetry. Most poems, however, are unpublished or self-published and rarely appear in the media. Prizes for the best novels of the year far outweigh those for poems, and movies and television series now shape public conversation. In such a world it is understandable to make the promotion of poetry a cause. In the language of marketing, poetry has become a niche activity, attracting a small but faithful market.
Even the name, however, suggests that niche markets are important. Niches provide a place of respect for the saints on church walls. Nests, too, from which the word niche may derive, provide the nurturing essential for the survival and thriving of birds. Their importance cannot be measured by the value popularly assigned to them.
The importance of poetry, too, comes from the ground up. It gathers people together loosely through a care for words. Some people write poems, others are content to read them. Some desire a wider hearing, others are content to share them with friends, again others write poetry for their own ear. Some write for reading, others for hearing.
Regardless of how widely it is published and whether it reaches a small or readership, the network of poetry has a significant place in society. It honours and explores what is distinctive about human beings – communication through words. It acknowledges the word as a gift and those who have layered and developed it. It treasures words, notices their history, listens to the association of their sounds with the world, and plays with them in constructing form and structure.
Above all, at the heart of poetry is close attention. It begins by attending to the world around us and finding words to describe what we see, hear, touch, taste and smell. It also involves attending to our own experience of the world and finding the right words to capture it. This is a rewarding though ultimately impossible task, as Proust and Joyce showed in their different ways in prose. Poetry demands a slow writing and a slow reading that is always coloured by the experience and prejudices which the reader brings to it.
That is why people who identify profit exclusively with financial or reputational gain commonly regard the writing and reading of poetry as unprofitable. They see it as a waste of time, evoking stereotypes of poets as lovelorn youth who wander amid the wildflowers of spring and are too slow to thrive in the real world. At a deeper level, however, if we dismiss as a waste of time the slower rhythms involved in the writing and reading of poetry, we are likely to discover how time spent unreflectively wastes us.
Attention paid to our world and to our experience of it leads naturally to celebration. In searching for precise and evocative words, rhythms and images in order to describe the world and to respond to it we recognise that the world is more than we can understand but is a gift to be celebrated. The writing and reading of poetry evoke gratitude. Although it always falls short in describing it and may also focus on the horror of the world, it invites celebration. In their writing and reading, good poems take us to places beyond our initial expectation. The best words and images seem to come from nowhere. Poets and their readers are always amateurs, drawn to places where their skills fall short. Amateurs, too, in the original sense – lovers of the word who treasure the gift of what lies beyond it.
'Above all, at the heart of poetry is close attention. It begins by attending to the world around us and finding words to describe what we see, hear, touch, taste and smell. It also involves attending to our own experience of the world and finding the right words to capture it. This is a rewarding though ultimately impossible task, as Proust and Joyce showed in their different ways in prose. Poetry demands a slow writing and a slow reading that is always coloured by the experience and prejudices which the reader brings to it.'
That celebration of poetry for what it points to explains why it is often described in religious terms. Poetry is a gift associated with the Gods and in its failure ever to do full justice to the world of our experience it evokes a world beyond or above our own. That can be true even when a poet dismisses religion for its cheap evocation of another world. To attempt the impossible affirms the possibility of something always beyond or beneath our reach.
Although it demands solitary attention, poetry is also a social activity. In it an army of poets and readers are joined in the hope of a better, more human world. In making society better, poetry is useless but valuable, ineffective but powerful, irrelevant but vital. Its value lies in the attention it pays to public and private language. It sifts the shallow from the deep, the false from the true, the facile from the challenging, the demeaning from the respectful, the generous from the selfish, the cheap from the priceless, the simplistic from the complex.
When led to make such distinctions through attending to the world revealed in poetry, people became attuned to the false, the crude and the self-interested in the public languages of commerce, politics and polemic. Poetry purifies stagnant and toxic language. That is why populist and totalitarian rulers fear and censor it. It offers a vision of the world far richer and more demanding than that offered by the State. Stalin, who himself wrote poetry in his youth, had censors to enforce conformity. He was just one of many who have banned words and books which do not fit their ideology.
The part played by poetry in social change is indirect. It deepens our attention to the wonder of the world and to the words in which we represent it. In so doing it also makes us sensitive to the ways in which our own words and thoughts, as well as the attitudes of society, are cheap or brutal. It then invites us to act to make the world more just. Poetry, both that written with a specific focus on social justice and that which celebrates the precarious beauty of the world, changes the world by promoting conversion that can lead to action. That is no small gift.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street, and writer at Jesuit Social Services.