Why poetry?

Wandering through a local bookstore the other day, I came across Dorianne Laux’s Finger Exercises for Poets (Norton, 2024) on the poetry shelf, and, intrigued by the title, read a few pages and couldn’t resist buying the book and taking it home.

Laux, a poet whose work includes Only as the Day is Long, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, teaches in the low residency MFA program at Pacific University. Her book is filled with the kind of wisdom about writing and poetry that will inspire you to rush to your desk and begin writing. 

“This is what I think all poetic narratives seek to do,” writes Laux, “create stories within stories, layer upon layer of feeling and meaning, spinning it out like a spider, weaving this delicate net that holds time and space, image and language, clarity and mystery.”

Have you ever wondered what happens when we write a poem? 

Here’s Laux’s response to that question: 

“When we write a poem, we dissolve into the universe, and wake up refreshed and alive.”

“Each poem,” according to Laux, “is a thank-you note to that miracle. To each day we have been given as a gift.”

And if you’ve ever wondered why we write or read poetry, you might enjoy what Laux has to say in the section of her book, “Why Poetry?”:

You may as well ask, Why sunsets? Why bicycles? Why gnats and human beings? Why trees? Why the small and larger things that make up this world? Why stars? Why dust? We swirl around and inside of chaos. The word we’re born into is a noisy, messy, confusing place full of moments of boredom and surprise. We are in the center of our lives always, and yet there are times we feel on the outside looking in, a question on our lips, unable to formulate it, or if we do manage to find words, speak them, we can only hope they can capture some of what that chaotic world inside feels like. And if we do, if we are able, for a moment, the world both without and within simultaneously stills, sits motionless between ourselves and others, ourselves and the world. We feel a semblance of satisfaction and achievement, something like joy.

And she shares what Tu Fu, who is considered one of China’s greatest poets of the Tang dynasty, has to say about poetry: “Poetry is like being alive, twice.”

In Laux’s words, “poetry is a place set aside in the imagination, in the soul, for pure making, pure being. Most of our lives are spent in prescribed fashion, where to go, what to wear, who to meet when, to what purpose? Our thoughts are taken mostly with questions of preparation, execution, completion.”

“This is why poetry: to carve a moment out of the chaos,” writes Laux, “to live the moments we are most alive into what we are built to be, sense-making and nonsense-making machines, all our powers working together: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, fully being in this world we’ve been given as a gift, making it ours through art, and then giving it away.”

For more information about Dorianne Laux and her work, visit: https://www.doriannelaux.net/