What does poetry do

We all have many ideas milling around in our heads, and a poem is the perfect place to let them run wild. Poetry lets us positively share our feelings. Many of us feel angry, frustrated, sad, or fearful from time to time. However, because these feelings are unpleasant, we often keep them locked up inside of us. Writing and reading poetry help us let these feelings out and also better understand them.

Poems like this one have showed me that feeling a little blue is not always such a bad thing and, just as importantly, that when I do, I am not alone. A love of poetry can take time to develop. Poetry is exploration. Poetry provides windows into the thoughts and feelings of others, not just of today but of the distant past.

One could say that the speaker is channeling the collective psychosis, splicing and dicing a slew of rhetorics. The most striking and "resistant" thing about "The aircraft rotates" may be its enigmatic point of view. The omniscient narrator speaks from an undisclosed position, in a tone hard to "read"--is it bitter, amused, helpless, sarcastic? In its manner, Lerner's poems fit the description of "elliptical" poetry offered by critic Stephen Burt: "always hinting, punning, or swerving away from a never-quite-unfolded backstory; they are easier to process in parts than in wholes.

They believe provisionally in identities. And, since sentences arrive in such fierce non-sequitur rapidity, we don't know if the speaker is reporting this frothy modern thrashing of comprehension, or administering it, like some savage jester. Such is the enigmatic stance of the poems. These poems capture some essentials of modern experience, but they intentionally offer no harbor for the traveler, neither consolation nor explanation.

It's a prosody of, and about, violence. Here's another poem from that book:. At the reception, cookies left over from the intervention. In the era before the flood, you could speak in the second person. Now the skylighted forecourt is filled with plainclothesmen. I would like to draw your attention. Like a pistol? In the sense of a sketch? Both, she said, emphasizing nothing, if not emphasis.

Squint, and the room dissolves into manageable triangles. Close your eyes completely and it reappears. Lerner is clever, worldly, and resourceful, but his poetic mode of quick-changes tends to come off as overwhelmingly ironic or antagonistic. His topic isn't just the untrustworthiness of perception and perspective itself, but the oppressiveness of the maelstrom. Plainclothesmen, a flood, an intervention: it's not event or narrative that is missing; it's the lack of any centralizing emphasis, or rather the emphasis of nothing--which, to be fair, the poem self-describes--which makes reading the poem the equivalent of a labyrinth, hollow and circular.

It is a poetry both confrontational and evasive. Lerner's relentless focus on the contextless "yaw and angle" of contemporary consciousness--how we know, how we represent, the systems we are subject to--phenomenology, epistemology--are representative preoccupations of his generation.

If the Plath generation was obsessed with psychological extremity, and the eighties generation with narratives of self, the generation of the oughts has been obsessed with exposing the fallibilities of perspective. But what comes after? Rusty Morrison's "please advise stop" poems there are sixty-four in her book the true keeps calm biding its story also practice the stylistics of vertigo--each poem is a semi-fragmentary, declarative sequence of phrases, set against a murky but discernibly oppressive narrative background--unlike Lerner's poems, Morrison's overall tone is not knowledgeable irony, but wary pathos; this narrator is a pilgrim in a strange world, a vulnerable if never-identified speaker:.

I heard a drawer pull open but not its philosophies rearing up in jagged peaks stop how to walk off the hackles we raise so carelessly stop how does a sequence continue to startle its way through clouds of conclusions please.

Implicitly, the halting disjointedness stands for the psychological disruption of inner life. Yet it seems the speaker's traumatized state of being is not a psychological this isn't an abuse narrative but a metaphysical sense of endangerment. Thus, though emotionally plaintive, Morrison's poems include plenty of intriguing conceptual assertions on the subject of cognition itself.

In this way Morrison and Lerner are different--the one aggressive and socially satirical; the other bereft and distinctly private in emotional register.

But, like Lerner, Morrison combines a forceful thrusting style with a disjunctive form to represent a system in extreme disorder. Morrison's poems combine sophisticated self-consciousness with stylistic primitivity--one of contemporary poetry's most appealing hybrid combinations C.

Wright, Jorie Graham, D. Powell , which, at its best, makes for a potent representation of interior vertigo. In fact, Morrison's fluttering, anxious prosody resembles Graham's darting graphs of consciousness. For all their disarticulation, Morrison's poems employ an elaborate formal fiction. The end words of every three-line stanza are the same: please, stop, please advise--words meant to evoke not just the speaker's emotional condition, but the clipped grammatical form in which Western Union telegrams were once sent.

The framing conceit of this compressed, invented form is richly suggestive: a nameless traveler in a far-off land, in distress, is reporting back, and asks for advice through a narrow technological aperture the telegraph-sentence. Vertigo is both the story and the style of these poems.

By issuing each line as a broken-off, truncated unit, shunning continuity and complex grammatical relations, the poems imply a world where things do not accrue sense, nor progress as story. It is a choppy, chopped-up world, at best, and a chopped-up speaker, as well. The lack of capitalization and punctuation likewise sets us adrift, implying a landscape of no boundaries:. The poems in the true keeps calm biding its story are full of velocity, often keenly phrased, and conceptually acute.

There are scores of intriguing, aphoristic lines to savor, like those above. And Morrison's poems are in concert with modern perspectives on the instability of meaning, knowing, and saying. The conceptual self-consciousness of lines like those above alerts us to the epistemological dimension of the speaker's crisis.

Many lines in the "please advise stop" poems explicitly emphasize the futility--and, in a weird way, the falsehood--of making experience cohere. The content of any one moment does not--perhaps must not--connect to any other in the past or future: "wash one's face of any resemblances before they mingle". Thus, the speaker is exiled in manifold ways: physically, religiously, and hermeneutically.

This world is post-Humpty Dumpty: the speaker cannot put it together again. To their credit, the poems are not emotionally obscure--they wear their existential poignancy on their sleeve.

In manner and matter, this is a poetry of ardent trauma:. I add brush-strokes to my visions to thicken their surface courage stop novelty prodding me with its impatience-stick stop my flashlight held high under the blanket stop. The true keeps calm biding its story contains plentiful virtuosity. Nonetheless, after reading nine or ten "please advise stop[s]," one begins to feel worn out.

It takes a lot of work to stay tuned to a present that steadily deconstructs itself, that refuses to make a history. And no discourse does accumulate, because in this universe, each moment, each insight, each breath, each memory is transient, anonymous, and oblique; each insight reiterates its instability.

The reader waits in vain for something besides the speaker's disconcertedness to manifest--more "plot" of some kind. But the sequence itself suffers from exactly this flaw, a kind of homogeneity of disruptedness. The instability of this world eventually registers as a feverish and telegrammatic numbness. Samuel Beckett made great literature of such modern spiritual deprivation, and he too used repetition as a device.

Yet fifty-four episodes of "please advise stop" leave us with the question, Should we praise a book for its intriguing concept and method, or even its brilliant individual lines, if the method creates monotony?

Of course, this is an issue--not much acknowledged--that haunts much experimental poetry: the use of disrupted poetic forms results in a style but resists shape. Thus the individual poems very often lack individual dramatic identity. They may be remarkable or ingenious in their process, but unremarkable in their shapeliness--in turn, such poems are difficult to remember. How this affects their value as art is hard to say. One might extrapolate from these several examples the features of a period style.

Here are the characteristics I observe:. A heavy reliance on authoritative declaration. I have found that the best way to grasp internal turmoil is to write poetry. It slows the world down around you. It streamlines your thoughts to short, direct sentences, while soothing the anxiety out of your body with the lyrical style. It makes you think. It puts a spotlight on what the issues might be and forces you to logically and methodically answer to it.

Poetry can give you insights into yourself that you never knew existed but always wanted to understand. Poetry can give you that power. The Writer's Digest team has witnessed many writing mistakes over the years, so this series helps identify them for other writers along with correction strategies. This week's mistake is to write all the time without taking a break for other activities. Author Beth Kirschner discusses how to create character conflict that can mirror a larger societal conflict.

Award-winning author Joy Castro discusses how her free webinar series, Writing Brilliant Essays, is a marriage between pre-COVID classroom practices and the incorporation of what she learned when education went virtual. For the November PAD Chapbook Challenge, poets are tasked with writing a poem a day in the month of November before assembling a chapbook manuscript in the month of December. Today's prompt is to write a raw poem.

Every good story needs a nice or not so nice turn or two to keep it interesting. This week, let your character travel to another dimension. When writing about real people in historical fiction, what might the consequences be of taking certain artistic liberties? Author Robert Lloyd discusses the ethics of literary revivification. Ambassador Philip Kaplan discusses how the characters came to him through the magic of the writing process in his debut novel, Night In Tehran.

Today's prompt is to write a memory poem. Write Better Fiction. Short Story. Writing Techniques. Write Better Nonfiction.

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All creative ideas and opinions expressed are purely my own. Read our full privacy policy and disclosure for more information. Why is poetry important? Read the five reasons that support the importance of poetry in primary school and instill a love for poems in the classroom.

Read the five reasons that explain the importance of teaching poetry, and instill a love for poems in the classroom. Children will love these activities that build reading, writing, and language skills. There tend to be two types of teachers when it comes to poetry: Ones who love it and bring it into the classroom freely and often. Then others stay clear.

Or they may not enjoy poetry themselves, and this prevents them from introducing it in the classroom. Give it a try! Open a book of poems. Read the odd poem to your class.

Find a poem that goes along with your classroom theme and share. Ask children about their experiences with poetry and how it makes them feel. Poetry has a place in our curriculum. It can be taught as part of reading, writing, and language lessons, and it fits easily into classroom themes, projects, and celebrations.

It can add additional value to our studies. Poem of the week activities can be easily implemented to strengthen language arts lessons. This post includes five reasons to teach poetry in the classroom. If you are a poetry advocate already, I hope you gain some additional insight and ideas to strengthen your program.

If you are reluctant to teach poetry, I encourage you to read the reasons why and to find out for yourself. The reasons listed, as well as FREE activities to try, will help guide you in the right direction! Why teach poetry? Children need to learn to read a variety of texts and poems are one of those forms. The unique thing about poetry is that we often read aloud, repeat often, and share in groups. When children are listening to poems orally, they are building their listening skills.