What's the point of poetry?
"To affect, even if for just the length of a sparkler in July, one person’s life..." —PHILIP SCHAEFER, Poet of the Week
Deadline April 30: $3600 ONLY POEMS PRIZE, closing in about a week!
Philip Schaefer’s collection Bad Summon (University of Utah Press, 2017) won the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize, while individual poems have won contests from The Puritan, Meridian, & Passages North. His work has been featured on Poem-A-Day, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and in The Poetry Society of America. He runs a modern Mexican restaurant called The Camino in Missoula, MT.
Letter to the Unborn
You do not yet live & it is possible you never will. Still I mow the lawn with your name under tongue, the letters pulsing together like a maraca of bees. I rub the magic 8 ball of my gut & pretend I am a mother, but the clouds read better luck next time. I palm the handle of my hatchet & imagine us deep in the woods by a body of water so green you could dream up anything, shaving kindling off the years, making memories we’re bound to forget. I rest the god of my hand on your neck, silently show you how to blow a small galaxy of wind between your fingertips, how to turn thin air into energy. Our best conversations happen on days like this, summer sun a mirage of itself. Gasoline on my wrists, wondering if you’ll exist.
Isn’t that the entire point of poetry, even a single poem? To affect, even if for just the length of a sparkler in July, one person’s life?
I knew immediately the idea of having a child, not having a child, whatever result may lie, was my new muse. Either I will get to write out of the pleasure and pain of what may come for naught, or who knows, maybe these little poems will become a relic for a child on her first stroll through campus someday.
…
I want to reach a truth that skips the more logical responses of our minds. Cohen was on the nose. And in poetry we have a rare luxury: we are probably the most underappreciated and least comprehended art genre out there, so middle birds up. Talk to some blue god’s dachshund while huffing battery glue. Sneak into a resting hot air balloon. Tell your unborn daughter you want to throw a mattress on her. Mean it (but also don’t).
What’s the point of poetry?
You can catch up on some of the answers to last week’s question here:
This week, inspired by Philip Schaefer’s interview, we ask a prickly question and ask you to ask yourselves the same (perhaps before a proverbial mirror!). Why is it we do what we do when what we do is poetry, something oft-scorned, and more-oft (is that a word/phrase?) ignored? So, poetry, what’s it good for — what’s the point of it all?
Any word that rhymes, ain't a poem; just people talking can be tho
What is the serrated edge of poetry?