I must have been eleven or twelve years old when I read my first proper poem, it was the lyrics of the song All along the watchtower by Bob Dylan. I read it from a huge book that collected all of Dylan's lyrics up to that point, the book I found, precisely open to the lyrics of that song, in a Costco. I remember being blown away by the things that lyric said (I didn't understand a single one of them, but that didn't matter to me). By that age, I had already read Hamlet, but for me that didn't count as poetry. I had this idea of what poetry was supposed to be and, for reasons that evade me at the moment, there was no place in that idea for a play to have poetry in it (never mind the fact that it was in verse, rhymed, and written by William Shakespeare). However, there was something very interesting about those lyrics, something that told me that it must be poetry, without a doubt. I also remember that as soon as I read those letters I took the huge book in my arms, ran to my mother and begged her to buy it for me, she, of course, said no and asked me to return it to its place (It wasn't until I turned twenty that I saw that book again when my parents gave it to me as a Christmas present).
While my attempt to get my mother to buy me a rather expensive book full of lyrics by a singer I didn't know at the time failed that day, I like to think that was the reason I became interested in poetry.
Now, I imagine that anyone with good taste would probably find my first encounter with “proper poetry” rather amusing (or a clear sign of the literary decadence that's going on today), but, well, it seems to me that there are worse places to start getting interested in poetry.
Little by little I got carried away by that interest, reading a little Dylan Thomas here, a little Rimbaud there, a lot of Bob Dylan all over the place, until I ended up becoming a poetry fanatic. Again, at first I didn't understand much of what the poems I was reading were saying, but that didn't frustrate me in the least, what did frustrate me was something else entirely: what was poetry for?
The answer I gave myself to that changed constantly as I got older and read more poetry. At one time I thought it was for expressing secret things, as a kind of code, then I thought it was for being able to say how sad you felt in a way that people would take it seriously, at another time I thought it was more of a tool for convincing the opposite sex that you were profound. All those ideas about the usefulness of poetry faded (thankfully) as time went on, but the question has never entirely left me.
Today, I like to think of myself as a little more than a poetry fan (indeed, with a couple of drinks in me, the right lighting and the confidence that I won't be mocked forever, I'd dare to call myself a poet) and the question is still not quite settled.
I think what gets me most about the question is how seemingly simple it is. It almost feels like it can be answered immediately “Poetry is for this, period,” but for some reason it's not that easy. Every answer I can think of is immediately followed by a “Yes, but”: “Poetry is for expressing feelings. Yes, but that assumes that all poetry is confessional (which is not true)”, “Maybe poetry is for naming the beautiful. Yes, but that only applies to poetry that is deliberately beautiful. What about all poetry that goes against all that?” “Probably poetry serves to play with language. Yes, but is it only for that? That being the case the thing is very bland.”. Anyway, I have dozens of these little hypotheses, each and every one unable to answer my little question satisfactorily....
Interestingly enough, around the time I started writing this sketch I also decided to start playing a video game that gave me an answer which I find interesting to say the least.
The game is called The Witness, is about solving a series of graphical puzzles on a desert island. Truth be told, the game itself is not very entertaining (it's actually quite monotonous and without much of a joke), however, it does have a couple of interesting things. Around the game you can find a number of audio and video clips scattered around the island. The clips are of short speeches, quotes or lectures by people the game designer thought were interesting; there are quotes from Buddha, Einstein, Oppenheimer and the like on a wide variety of things (there's a great one taken from a lecture by the GDC on Shakespeare and the nature of video game development).
Anyway, it was one of those clips that gave me an answer that seems to me to come pretty close to answering my question about the usefulness of poetry. The clip in question is a video excerpt from the 1978 show Yesterday, Tomorrow and You BBC, presented by historian of science James Burke. In it Burke talks about knowledge, about how it has always been the people who possess that knowledge who end up changing the world (for better and for worse) and about how the people who possess that knowledge to change the world today are the scientists. After mentioning the latter, Burke responds to the viewer's hypothetical question “Where does that leave artists?” with a somewhat peculiar answer. Burke looks at the camera and nonchalantly says:
“Let me suggest to you something with which you may violently disagree: that at best the products of human emotion: art - philosophy - politics - music - literature. They are interpretations of the world, which tell you more about who is saying them rather than the world of which they speak. Second-hand views made third-hand by your interpretation of them.”
A bit intense, isn't it? Pompous even. But it has a lot of truth in it, though I don't think in the way Burke thought it would.
The arts are undoubtedly a perspective on the world and certainly tell us more about the people who made them than about their world. If you don't believe me, think about how much you know about your favorite artists and how that relates to their work. It's not always a one-to-one conversion, but there's always a part of it.
Brian Wilson put his mental brokenness into the songs of SMiLE, F. Scott Fitzgerald captured his tempestuous relationship with Zelda Fitzgerald in the pages of The Great Gatsby, Sylvia Plath's emotional instability will live on forever in her life. The Bell Jar, Andy Warhol presented his peculiar fascination with advertising in his Campbell's Soup. There are many examples.
What is important here is not the fact that the artists have put their perspective on life in their works but what they did with it: they asked (mostly unconsciously) everyone who came into contact with their work “Have you never felt like this?”. Even the answer itself is not important, since just by asking you that question they have already made contact with you in the deepest possible way: they have made you examine yourself. That being so, poetry is perhaps the art that can most effectively make that connection.
Writing poetry is very similar to being naked in front of someone, it implies vulnerability, laying yourself totally bare and letting the person examine you, touch you, see your scars, know what excites you, what hurts you, what you don't want to say because it embarrasses you, know and see everything. If we add to the above that, as we already said, art is dedicated to ask if the other person feels the same, in this metaphor it is as if the other person, who reads the poem, is also naked and compares right there everything already mentioned. Perhaps the person does not think that what he sees has much relation with himself, but he will see something fundamental: that the poet also has scars, also gets excited, also hurts, it does not matter if it is for the same reason, it only matters the fact that there is this relationship between the poet and the one who reads it.
Maybe that's what poetry is for, to show someone that you are human and to remind that person that they are human too.
Maybe none of this makes sense and poetry serves a totally different purpose, but, well, I feel that way about what poetry is for.
Photography by Denis Ryabov
Terrible writer that's very good at acting like a good one.