Why Poetry?

Photographic portrait of Wallace Stevens by Sylvia Salmni, 1948

The Album cover to “Discipline” by King Crimson

The noted poet E.E. Cummings self published a volume of his poetry and listed the names of the eleven traditional publishing houses that had rejected it in his introduction!

As I assembled this collection of poems composed through twenty-five years of my life, I found myself asking two questions: Why do I feel compelled to write poems? And why do I desire to show them to other people? These questions are so basic that they seem trivial, but as with most basic inquiries the answers are profound as well as ordinary.

In the beginning of this volume there are two quotes. The first is by Wallace Stevens: “Poetry is a response to the necessity of getting the world right.” Stevens, notwithstanding his rich poetic imagination, was an eminently practical man. He created his art in a world defined by parameters that would not commonly be associated with a poet. He held a full time job as an executive with the Hartford Insurance Company. He walked to work daily. He had marriage problems and dealt day after day with the run of the mill responsibilities of a man in his social position. Most of his co-workers were unaware of his status as a poet, and those that did know were for the most part confused by what he wrote. (I can imagine them around the water cooler asking, “what does he mean by ‘let be be the finale of seem’?) Yet because of his life (not in spite of it) he created some of the most profound modern poetry of the 20th Century. And it came from “getting the world right.” So what did he mean by that?

We are all individuals that burst into the world without our permission and we spend most of our time figuring out how to survive in the most practical way. For many people, experience stops right there, but for artists and sensitive thinkers there are additional matters with which to wrestle. These take the form of questions of the most fundamental kind: Why am I here? Why are some people good and others evil? How can I avoid suffering and be happy? And the most vital of all, is there something more to life than just existing in a material world?  Answering those types of question is what Stevens meant, in my opinion. For him, poetry was the tool he used to work out those matters.

This does not reduce poetry, or the other arts, to mere therapy, though there are many poets whose work, it seems to me, is fixated by the process of healing personal problems. “Getting it right” is an expression of the lyrical imagination that changes personal and private experience into universal imagery and tone. In doing so the poet makes contact with the emotions of an audience whose minds are engaged with the same questions and experiences. In the creation of common experience the artist generates a new beautiful object.

Perhaps a better way to put it would be that poetry is a response to consciousness. For myself that is why I write. Sometimes I am privileged and manage to come up with a poem that approaches what I would call an ideal. I am the first to admit that there are many flaws in my work, but perfection in any creative endeavor is only achieved consistently by a few of us. In these poems I have tried to get as close as I could to that goal of beauty and lyricism. You can decide for yourself if I have succeeded.

Which leads to the second quote and the second question, from a song lyric by King Crimson:

I carried it around me for days and days
playing little games
like not looking at it for a whole day
and then looking at it
to see if I still liked it.
I did.

These lyrics by guitarist Adrian Belew came verbatim from a letter written to him by his wife describing a difficult experience she was having with the creation of a piece of sculpture. A few years ago, not long after I had gone through a long and frustrating attempt to build publication of my work in small magazines, I met a poet who accused me of “liking my poems too much.” That statement made no sense to me (and in retrospect seems asinine.) If I don’t like it my art, who in the hell else will?

For years I wrote not for an audience, but for myself. This took place because I am unwilling to show work when I know it is unfinished or unsuccessful (according to my esthetic standards anyway), and because there was probably not much chance of getting it published in the first place, even after years of attempts on my part to follow the traditional path of publication. Not writing for an audience can result in poems that are self-referential and that do not contain the crucial lyric universality. Yet at the same time I knew that there were pieces that I had completed that sounded good to my ear and eye, and to the sensibilities of people both trained and untrained in the poetic arts.   

So I carried them around for days and days (years and years) looking at them, not looking at them, reading them, not reading them, sending them out for publication, and for the most part having them come back to me either unread or marked up with red pens as if I had sent them to the cranky teacher of a creative writing class. And I still liked them.

Then came the phenomenon of print on demand publishing. Because “I like them” you hold the result in your hand. You can decide, dear reader, if you like them. There is no arbiter between you and me who decides whether or not we can communicate with each other. For me, I now feel as if I have the potential for a authentic audience. My desire is not to be famous (I haven’t the qualifications or desire) or rich (I’m not that naïve, and like Stevens I have a profession outside of literature that I enjoy very much). Rather I feel as if there is a chance for these poems to reach thoughtful people who may never meet me personally. And perhaps the best part is knowing that they have another home other than the hard disk of my computer.

So why do I write poems? Because I need to. And why do I want to show them to others? Because I like them and I think others might also. As I said, these are simple questions with simple answers, but the process that they circumscribe is one of the most significant in a world made up of billions of individual consciousnesses experiencing the universe separately: communication through imagination and willing words.

Richard Gylgayton