Poetry and humanity

Sketching

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/17/poetry-human-therapy-mental-health

Extract:

Consider what, if encouraged, each of us might cultivate on that vast fallow plain that lies between the extremes of love and death, the weddings and the funerals to which poetry, for most of us, becomes confined. If there were a more broadly accepted sense that we structure reality through language, then poetry becomes a useful tool, as it allows us, to borrow ” our lives, or even to simply arrive at a deeper appreciation of the here and now.Adam Phillips’s term, to “redescribe our lives

Of course this begins with the way poetry is taught in schools, and with a shift from an emphasis on “understanding” to “enjoyment”. As soon as we are told what a poem is or should be rather than being affirmed as an innately human and instinctive form of expression, poetry grows to be seen as the preserve of others. What we are left with, over time, is an impoverished shorthand in the popular imagination, poetry as a sort of doggerel for wooing or mourning. But it can do so much more than this. Poetry can help locate us in the everyday but also remind us of the resounding mystery in life, think of Philip Larkin constructing a religion from water, or William Carlos Williams noticing that red wheelbarrow or Sharon Olds imagining The Pope’s Penis, which “hangs deep in his robes, a delicate clapper at the center of a bell”.

Discovering what we think or feel about something or someone through language, the revivifying effects of the contemplation of objects or memories through words, is something we can all practise – the impulse to do so is one of the things that makes us human. In an age of resources such as the Poetry Archive, well on its way to making available recordings online of nearly all contemporary poets working in the UK, it strikes me that the only thing needed is a shift in the culture.