Something of Myself
Thursday, December 15, 2005
And then there was Jeanette Winterson
Reading her collection of essays - this one is on Poetry - the following just swept me off my feet:
Poetry always bears witness, but it is witness of a different kind to the front page of The Times. Only by imagining our lives can we fully understand them, or re-make them. Recording them is not enough.
This is not to say that we have no need of history, or politics, or daily news – of course we do, and poetry that is made separate from life is not poetry at all. But the poet speaks differently to the historian or the politician or the journalist. The poem itself has other work to do. In a world drowning in useless information, poetry returns us to what is meaningful. The poem acts a pocket of air in an upturned boat.
To the bean counters and economic gurus, a poem looks like the most useless thing on earth. It is not a money machine, you can’t sell it to Hollywood or use it for product placement. You can’t say long it will take to make, or how long it will last, (how maddening in an economy that depends on throwaways, that a poem can last forever). The poem, by its very nature, questions the dominant values of our world, and as William Carlos Williams put it, ‘it is hard to get the news from poems/ but men die miserably every day/for lack of what is found there.’
Reading her collection of essays - this one is on Poetry - the following just swept me off my feet:
Poetry always bears witness, but it is witness of a different kind to the front page of The Times. Only by imagining our lives can we fully understand them, or re-make them. Recording them is not enough.
This is not to say that we have no need of history, or politics, or daily news – of course we do, and poetry that is made separate from life is not poetry at all. But the poet speaks differently to the historian or the politician or the journalist. The poem itself has other work to do. In a world drowning in useless information, poetry returns us to what is meaningful. The poem acts a pocket of air in an upturned boat.
To the bean counters and economic gurus, a poem looks like the most useless thing on earth. It is not a money machine, you can’t sell it to Hollywood or use it for product placement. You can’t say long it will take to make, or how long it will last, (how maddening in an economy that depends on throwaways, that a poem can last forever). The poem, by its very nature, questions the dominant values of our world, and as William Carlos Williams put it, ‘it is hard to get the news from poems/ but men die miserably every day/for lack of what is found there.’
3 Comments:
**In a world drowning in useless information, poetry returns us to what is meaningful.
Spot on! Without poetry how empty our lives would be...and how devoid of beauty and emotions would it be?
Keshi.
Indeed Keshi. :-)
Hi there,
I am going through the period in my life when I am supposed to earn hard or at least study hard(an excuse to put off work for sometime.)But to everyone's surprise except mine all i do is indulge in the luxury of writing poetry.
And the person i am ...feel guilty for indulging in luxury.
NOT ANYMORE...not after reading this essay on Poetry.
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