Interviews
Jay Parini reflects on poetry and its place in our lives . . .
For almost forty years, I've begun every morning by reading poetry and, usually, writing it as well. I tend to read classic poets, especially Wordsworth, Whitman, Dickinson, Hopkins, Frost, Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens. I also wade among the contemporary poets, especially Adrienne Rich, Seamus Heaney, Charles Simic, Charles Wright, Louise Glück, and Mary Oliver. I refer often to these poets in Why Poetry Matters.
As I say in these pages, poetry is a language adequate to our experience. It teaches us how to live our lives, how to locate and describe the inner life. I believe very confidently that poetry enhances our sense of the spiritual world by attaching us closely—almost physically—to the material world. The Scriptures didn’t end when the Bible was set in stone. In fact, prophets arise constantly, and poetry is a form of prophesy, telling us things we need to know. It is, as Ezra Pound says, news that stays news. It refreshes our lives by refreshing our sense of language, making reality visible in unique ways.
I argue in various ways in this book that poetry offers a way to sanity and clarity, helping us to see ourselves and our world. It offers modes of expression, refining the language of ordinary life. It is the “common language heightened,” as Hopkins says. By offering a language adequate to experience, poetry creates a reality that is equal to the reality of experience, and therefore makes reality palpable, “real,” understandable.
This is a deeply personal book, the result of long reflection on the art of poetry, as a reader of poems and a poet. I've also been a teacher of poetry for as many years, and Why Poetry Matters is to some degree a result of trying to help students to read poetry with genuine appreciation and feeling. My hope is that this book will make poetry available to a much wider audience by talking about its essential aspects in straightforward but suggestive ways.
