A review of Every Riven Thing, Swan and Walking Papers

Two questions for today: First, why read poetry? I mean, really—who cares? Who has the time, not to mention coin, when you could be reading tremendous novels and stunning essays? And second, what is great poetry? Is there really such a thing, or is the idea merely a canard sold by a cabal conspiring to foist such inaccessible murk as The Waste Land on us by calling it great when you know and I know that no one understands hardly a shred of it?

Some tiptoeing toward answers: Poetry is "memorable speech," said the (great) poet Wystan Hugh Auden, "about birth, death, the Beatific Vision." Or, in less lovely words: good poetry, great poetry, is the distilled salt and song of the way we speak; it is espresso speech, perhaps; it pierces and penetrates and illuminates, it makes us see fresh.

Poetry is crucial to us as human beings, for speaking memorably and listening ferociously is perhaps how we best evolve and pray powerfully and stutter toward grace and peace and joy, toward a world where no child weeps and violence is a dark memory. If we do not, as a species, speak memorably and listen ferociously, we have no horizon, no map, no theme. Think, for example, of a world in which the thin Jewish man Yeshua ben Joseph did not speak so colorfully and memorably of forgiveness and grace. Would we have come even this far toward the Light?