I’ve been asked, “Why do you write poetry? You can’t make any money from it.” Very simply, some things are best expressed in a poem.
Why is that? What makes poetry a go-to genre, different from all others?
Poetry is the most expressive genre.
Paul Valéry, a French poet, said, “Prose is walking, and poetry is dancing.”
While the units of measurement for prose are the sentence and the paragraph, the units of measurement for poetry are the word and the line. Because of its compression and the resulting heightening of language, the effectiveness of each word is increased, giving each word more power. Poetry’s emphasis on sensory language (imagery) speaks directly to a reader’s experience, since we all connect with the world beyond ourselves through our senses, and even if its use is metaphorical, it communicates experientially. Its use of characterizing words creates mood and atmosphere, and its attention to the musicality of language, its rhythms, its sounds, all within its compressed and heightened frame, also help create that expressiveness. Line breaks focus the reader, guiding the reader through the poem in sometimes subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle ways. For example, if you end on a strong word, it emphasizes that word, the reader pauses there for an extra beat; if you end on a weak word, it pulls the reader into the next line. Even if you’re not writing concrete poetry, where the poem physically looks like its subject, line breaks create a visual experience for the reader.
Poetry is the most immediate genre.
With the compact vividness of its language, it is a way to catch the moment, capture and evoke feelings in all their intensity, as in the outpouring of poetry after 9/11, and it also helps us understand what we are experiencing, since words are specific, words define and create boundaries, and those attributes give the otherwise amorphous specificity.
I was called to the hospital when my brother, ill with terminal cancer, entered the phase called “actively dying.” As I sat at his bedside, I wrote this poem.
Vigil
He will go when he’s ready to go.
He will know, decide.
It is not up to me,
I can’t keep him here
much as I might want to.
My vigil is for me
to be with him
the breathing him
however hard those breaths might become.
He won’t know
not really.
He may sense but
he may not even be here then;
he may be drifting
testing out the clouds.
The vigil is for me
for us to be we
a while longer.
Poetry is impressionistic.
In my poem “Theft,” I describe a meaningful encounter between a young woman eating her lunch in the park and an artist who asks to draw her. Both are created impressionistically. She considers herself bland and uninteresting and is characterized by her brown-bag lunch of an American cheese sandwich, and he, Philippe, is characterized as exotic, not only an artist, but French. The poem moves from the immediate moment to “people more primitive than we” who believe having their picture taken is “theft of the soul” to create a context for what happens next. He sees her as she’s never seen herself. Philippe keeps the drawing, she keeps the memory, and she wonders if it is theft for Philippe to have taken what only he knew was there. This idea, just a bit over a page as a poem, was also written as a story. The story was 25 pages and contained backstory, dialogue, more description, all of which the poem did not need to accomplish its purpose. Also, in this poem, with line breaks at certain key points, I focused on the word “me” to great effect. While Philippe is drawing her:
It was strange, I thought,
that he did not look at me
when it was me
he was drawing.
With the repetition and the ending of two lines in a row with “me,” the reader focuses on it as she is doing because the experience is about her, but she’s seeing herself as a subject; the experience isn’t internalized.
But later, when she sees the drawing:
The drawing was
me
with a sensual beauty
I’d never seen
in a mirror.
The drawing’s revelatory impact on her is in that final “me” holding the line all by itself. It’s a very different “me” than in the previously cited stanza. None of this is expressly stated. It’s there by implication and achieved through line-break choices.
Poetry can capture past moments with an immediacy other genre can’t achieve.
Sailing with Clare
wisp of blue wool on the mast
showing the way the wind blows
channels of deeper blue
holding the cold currents
sails filling
and the Sunfish skims the surface
sunlight skittering like glitter
in our wake
memory persists
an enduring gift she gave
without knowing
on the shared spring Sunday
I went sailing with Clare
Here I used white space to evoke motion in the first stanza. Just as line breaks can have evocative power, so can use of white space in a poem. With no initial capitalization and no end punctuation, I suggest the lasting nature of this memory.
From poetry’s specificity comes the universal.
My poem “Billet Doux” describes a specific moment and through it conveys “love.”
Billet Doux
When I got down to
the breakfast table
this morning,
I smelled the sweet soap
scent
of your shaving cream.
I sat in your chair,
drank from your cup.
You were gone,
as our night,
but you lingered,
a sweet surprise,
like a love note left
for me.
This is the difference between poetry and greeting card verse. Greeting card verse is generic, full of generalizations we read something into. After all, millions of the same card are sold, all to people thinking that card is just perfect for this occasion, for that person.
Poetry is a part of us, deeply rooted in our experience, in our psyches, whether we realize it or not. Even before we are born, in the womb, we hear swish, swish, lubdub lubdub—rhythm. And children love poetry’s musicality. Children never have to ask why of poetry.
Barbara Novack is Writer-in-Residence at Molloy University and a member of their English Department. She founded and hosts Poetry Events, the on-campus reading series, and off campus, conducts highly regarded creative writing workshops and presents programs on various aspects of the writing life. She is author of the Pulitzer-Prize-nominated novel, J.W. Valentine, and five poetry collections, including Dancing on the Rim of Light, a collection of poems meditative, ironic and celebratory. Marquis Who’s Who has acknowledged her for her contribution to the arts and honored her with their Lifetime Achievement Award.