Poetry Power - Dr Jane Frank & Dr Kelli McGraw
It might be time to open your life to poetry…
Are you someone who only reads novels, biographies or short stories, perhaps? As a society, it seems we can’t shake off a curious resistance to poetry, refusing to acknowledge or to want to see that poetic language has a power that can free us to live our “best lives”. Many of us save poetry’s power for weddings, funerals and other celebratory rituals. In the Digital Age we are bombarded with waves of digital language, much of it misdirected and without nuance. Poetry, in contrast, has a uniquely personal power that can immerse us, shake us up, that often bears close re-reading, and that can move us to act, change or simply feel things deeply. That power surely has a particular value in 2022. Poetry is all around us, is a reflection of everything in our lives and is not bound by rules.
Poetry is all around us
Poetry’s patterned language can derive from titles on book spines, a page of newsprint, the label on a soup can, a sign across the line as you wait for your train to work, in the song lyrics through your headphones. Remember the magnetic poetry on the fridge? Reorganise words and collage them together to create new combinations that are meaningful to you. Try not to push it away. Let it in.
Our own pasts connect with the words on the page or in the air and everything we see around us in the moment— ice melting in our drink on a hot day, a butterfly spreading its cobalt wings on a summer leaf, water gushing along a storm water drain after a downpour. The poet’s words help us jump from image to memory to language and make personal meaning. The poem might be about a new season or about a relationship, about parenthood or climate change or war or death. Poetry allows an interaction with the world through a recreation of words, images and rhythms. It enables a deepening of life experience — connections bring meaning, openness and constant surprise.
Poetry is a reflection of everything in our lives
Adrienne Rich speaks of poetry as ‘an exchange of electrical currents through language’. She also says that ‘Someone writing a poem believes in a reader ... of that poem. The “who” of that reader quivers like a jellyfish’. Here she is referring to the partly common language that exists to which every single different reader brings their own memory snapshots, heartbeats and hopes. When what we see in the world is disturbing, poetry is an opportunity for this to be reflected to inspire action.
Poems have the potential to wake emotions, deliver new ways forward and imagine healed futures. Poetry can memorialise what has been lost. But poems can also remind us of beauty, reconfirm to us what is important and enduring, as well as advocate for new ways to live and to be. Poems can balance wry pragmatism with illuminating wisdom. Poems can help us meditate. Poems can bind us together as a species to bring greater good. Donna Ward says that ‘poems are the prayers of a secular world.’ Poetry delivers truth and brings raw moments of understanding: it is a lens for us to understand and appreciate the world, baring open the vulnerable parts of us so we can understand others more completely.
Poetry is not bound by rules
It’s a mistake to think that poetry is locked into a set of rules from the past, is a chore that requires analysis or that poetry is something not about the most exciting parts of what is new or possible. Poet and novelist James Dickey writes that encounters with poetry ‘bypass all classrooms. All textbooks, courses, examinations and libraries, and go straight to the things that make your own existence exist: to your body and nerves and blood and muscles’, imploring us to open ourselves to the poetic moment, the now of our existence. Poems don’t have to be what is conventional or popular. Write or read the poems that you are driven to write or read!
Poems are often part puzzle, part mystery. Narrative isn’t necessary. Mood may, in fact, be more compelling for a poet. Able to harness or resist set formats, poetry is significant for its evocative qualities — sometimes poems are written to simply sound beautiful — but a poet takes tools like structure, form, tone and language to curate a specific effect or send a particular message to the reader in a poem. The images painted in poems and the musical aspects of the way they use language bring us in touch with figurative and artistic ways of knowing that would take prose a thousand words or more to even attempt replicating. They need not defy analysis or appraisal, but they do resist being pinned down by analytic ways of thinking. Poetry is continually evolving in terms of structure and language, endeavour and experiment, but continues to tap into our timeless emotional landscape. Let poetry into your life and you won’t regret it!
Dr. Jane Frank lectures in creative and professional writing at Griffith University. She is author of Regenerating Regional Culture: Study of the International Book Town Movement and two books of poetry, most recently Wide River. Jane has research interests in both poetics and cultural sociology, particularly literary culture and the ongoing significance of books in the Digital Age. She is a member of Queensland Poetry’s Management Committee and a former director of Regional Arts Australia.
Dr Kelli McGraw is a lecturer in secondary English education at Queensland University of Technology and an English teacher at Kelvin Grove Secondary College. Kelli researches the fields of secondary school curriculum and assessment, teacher identity, digital literacy and popular culture. She is lead author of the English for Queensland textbooks for senior English (Oxford University Press) and Editor of the scholarly journal English in Australia.
This article originally appeared in WQ 279: Queensland Poetry.
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