Why write poetry?

Jennifer Haupt: Why do you write poems, and why would anyone want to write a poem?

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Jane Hirshfield:

One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn’t know was in you, or in the world. Other forms of writing—scientific papers, political analysis, most journalism—attempt to capture and comprehend something known. Poetry is a release of something previously unknown into the visible. You write to invite that, to make of yourself a gathering of the unexpected and, with luck, of the unexpectable.Poetry magnetizes both depth and the possible. It offers widening of aperture and increase of reach. We live so often in a damped-down condition, obscured from ourselves and others. The sequesters are social—convention, politeness—and personal: timidity, self-fear or self-blindness, fatigue. To step into a poem is to agree to risk. Writing takes down all protections, to see what steps forward. Poetry is a trick of language-legerdemain, in which the writer is both magician and audience. You reach your hand into the hat and surprise yourself with rabbit or memory, with odd verb or slant rhyme or the flashing scarf of an image. This is true for discovering some newness of the emotions, and also true of ideas. Poems foment revolutions of being. Whatever the old order was, a poem will change it.

When young people ask writing advice, I sometimes say, “Open the window a few inches more than is comfortable.” As with all offered advice, the words are tuned first to my own ear and own life.

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