Poetry Is Dangerous

Chances are, you won't see any poetry in today's newspaper. Nor yesterdays, or even tomorrow's newspaper. You won't see poetry in the magazines that clutter your attention in grocery store lines. And poetry hardly ever, makes the New York Times Best Sellers list. Why?

Maybe it is because Poetry is difficult. Poetic language is packed with meaning and images. Poetry demands attention, it says, “look at me, remember the first time you got naked in front of the one you loved.” Or it asks us “to see a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.”

All that imagining, thinking and feeling is hard work. It burns calories. We are a busy people, a tired nation of peoples juggling work and family responsibilities. Therefore, poetry is difficult. I'm a poet and I shudder at the thought of sitting down and reading a whole book of poetry from cover to cover. Reading poem after poem is exhausting. The mind eventually wanders, disengages, and poetry is really boring, to the distracted mind.

Reading one poem at a time, however; can be like 'holding a shotgun to the head'. Yes poetry is dangerous to daily routines and scheduled thought patterns. Poetry poses questions that cannot be answered by the status quo's of our minds. The structure of society can be ruptured by such thoughts.

Maybe this is why we keep our poets poor. We keep our poets behind counters making sandwiches and selling pamphlets on the street so that they may speak for the nobodies. Which is to say the everybodies. The lot of us whose stories aren't pictured in celebrity gossip magazines or depicted on reality television. The culture industry does not want poetry. It's not profitable to an economy fueled by fear. Poetry asks us to love. “Even after all these years, the sun never says to the earth, “You owe me.” See what happens with a love like that: It lights up the whole sky.”

Poets ask us to look at that sky. These poets are often, “expelled from the academies for crazy and publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull.” But the people do look up at the sky, they tell their friends and families about these visions.

Poetry preserves the history of the people. Not the history we read from books in high school. Not the history of wars, political hero's and corporate miracles. But rather a history of what it's like to be alive. There is a difference between chronicling the cold casualties of war and
“I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of war,
But I saw they were not as was thought,
They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer'd not,
the living remain'd and suffer'd, the mothers suffer'd
the wife and child and musing comrade suffer'd...”

The difference is passion, life lived, by people who breathe, bread, and bleed.

By facing the dark depths of death and despair poetry can help us remember what it's like to be alive. Langston Hughes once wrote,
'The rent was due.
The lights were out.
I said, “tell me, mama
What's it all about?”
“We're waiting on Roosevelt Son.
Roosevelt. Roosevelt...

Sound Familiar?
What if we replaced Roosevelt with Obama?

By describing the particulars, the unique artifacts of culture, the spoons, bruises, spider webs, first kisses, paychecks, underwear, and sheet stains of a people, poetry becomes universal.

Poetry asks us to face our fears and embrace our dreams. We forget that Martin Luthar King Jr's “I have a dream speech” was a poem. Yes, reading a poem can be difficult. It's also difficult to live with the one you love, or make a meaningful and positive change to society. Difficult challenges create deeply satisfying rewards. It is ironic that every city has a Martin Luthar King Jr Blvd. And most of these blvds are ghettos. Yet, poetry realizes this irony and asks forgiveness for it's limitations. Poetry will not save the world. But poetry just might inspire you to save yourself.

As it was said in the movie Dead Poets Society, “We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But Poetry beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”