Poetry and Accessibility

Joshua Marie Wilkinson on poetry & accessibility at Evening Will Come:

In effect, asking what a poem is about is like asking what music is about. And our inability to answer that question succinctly is hardly a testament to the meaningless of poetry—or music for that matter. When we mistake a poem for a newspaper article or even an anecdote, then the expectations for a poem’s language changes—and drastically. As Eliot said, poetry “is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all.”

Indeed, at its best, a poem might be comprised of breath, desire, intelligence, and memory, our influences and conventions, rhythm and imagination, sound, narrative, history, and spontaneous play, as well as reference, emotion, the unconscious, and the music of language itself. As Robert Creeley put it simply, it is “a complex.”

Poetry resists just this kind of disclosure. To me, that is part of a poem’s unique power: ourinability to reduce it. In fact, poetry is already a reduction, or, as one of my undergraduate students said recently, “a compaction.”

Can I get an amen?