Marshall Hryciuk on the poetry collection he launches today in Toronto writes:
“I call them “franklie…” because poetry needs to cease whining or apologizing for having no purpose, no purchase in the social, political and mechanical world people without poetry call reality.
And if poetry makes nothing happen, symboliste poetry makes even less. Perhaps it’s high time that humans did something other than make things happen…”
via Sharon Harris
all
It all does something, like all art.
Sense entrains. A lack of sense sparks new
thoughts. Love it all, it’s good for you.
–JK
Coincidentally I was asking my students something like this the other day – after one was telling us that her inner critic insists that writing isn’t useful. “What use is poetry?” I asked her, and after a while she came up with, “It, um, inspires the mind; it, er, touches the feelings … the heart … and the soul…”
I put her out of her misery. “Yes, poetry opens the heart!”
I agree with JK that all art does the same.
Use? Purpose? Not the same thing, perhaps. “Purpose” implies a conscious intention, whereas I think the opening of the heart is more a side-effect. But still.
Anyway, we don’t make it for a purpose, other than to relieve the compulsion to make it. The behaviour of an addict, says one of my sons, wishing to persuade me it’s a poor use of my time. He may be right. I do it anyway.