Why I turn to poetry in tough times

Editor's Note: This essay appeared in Cognoscenti's newsletter of ideas and opinions, delivered weekly on Sundays. To become a subscriber, sign up here.

I don’t know much about poetry, in an academic sense. But I’ve loved it for as long as I can remember. The first poems I memorized came from the anthology, “A Child’s Garden of Verses,” which an elderly neighbor gave to my siblings and me in the late 1970s. When I thumbed through the pages while writing this, I was shocked by how many of the lines I could finish from memory nearly 40 years later. And, like every other Gen X kid, I still know all the characters Shel Silverstein introduced me to in his raucous, playful poems — including Sarah Cynthis Sylvia Stout, who would not take the garbage out.

As an adult, I’ve come back to poetry time again when I found my own feelings too big to name or explain without help. I read Rainer Maria Rilke as a confused college student, trying to figure out what came next (“Calling out, yet fearing/ Someone might hear the cry”). Debroah Garrison in the midst of early marriage and little kids (“If it had to be him/ or them/ let it be him”). And, Kate Baer in my middle age (“Nothing is easier and yet/ here we are making pancakes/ with the radio on”).

If the novel is an emotional marathon, the poem is an impassioned sprint, the 100m dash where you leave it all on the track. When Cog spoke to Kate Baer in 2023, she called poetry “boiled down storytelling.” Like the poet Rita Dove, I like to think of it as literature’s bouillon cube, a concentrated distillation of the human condition.

Just six months out of college, one of my very first magazine features was an interview with Dove, who was then the U.S. poet laureate. I was young and bold enough to ask her to sign a copy of one of her books as a gift for my mother, and she was generous enough to do it. “For Susan, who loves words as I do,” she wrote, “who loves life as we all must.” That stuck with me — and not just because the inscription itself was poetic. It reminds me that poetry is a tool of sorts that we carry with us.

Which helps explain why so many people turn to poetry in their most human moments. When they’re lost. When they’re in love. When they’re grieving. Poetry helps us make sense of the world and ourselves; it helps us take notice of the world, over and over again. Perhaps that’s why Cog contributor Jan Donley found herself reciting Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” on Nov. 6, the day after the election. And why she wrote a letter to her Berklee College of Music students, urging them to resist the temptation to divide the world into convenient opposites — loss and gain, good and evil, love and hate, man and woman, winners and losers — that tend to oversimplify the world. (Her letter became this essay.)

Poetry, unlike convenient opposites, reveals the world’s nuances. It requires concentration. It demands your presence and your participation. Reading poetry is as close as I’ll ever get to meditating. But that doesn’t mean it has to be difficult — not when you think of poems as Mary Oliver did: “fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.”

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