Reviews for Why Poetry Matters

The average rating for Why Poetry Matters based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-01-18 00:00:00 Michael Piazza I need to write an essay on 'leading educational ideas'. The problem is that the best I can come up with at the moment is how various metaphors related to curriculum effect the way kids end up being taught. The thing I like about this as a topic is that it will give me a chance to play with some of the language used in all of the texts I've been reading lately on curricula and to perhaps say something about how curricula work (or don't work). But before I start (and I've a proposal that is due in very soon that I haven't really started in anything more than mind map form) I thought I would go back and read some works on metaphor. This is a book I've been planning on reading for a while and now I have. It was less useful than I had hoped, but okay. Basically, this guy sees poetry as a number of things, but mostly as a kind of scripture. He sees poetry as coming from a deeply theological urge and maybe even urgency. As someone who can only understand religion, if at all, as a kind of aesthetic sense taken too far - I could almost agree with him on the nature of poetry. However, I think he goes much further on this 'poetry as scripture' theme than I feel comfortable with. He also says that poetry is deeply political too - fundamentally political - as it regards (re-envisions?) society. He does make the interesting point that many poets are quite politically conservative, but all the same often still play the role of truth tellers. As a kind of communication poetry is fundamentally about community - or so he feels. How much poets really do fulfil this role - also in his version of poet as protector of environment - really is open for debate. There are also philosophical discussions - not least around Wittgenstein's 'the limits of my language are the limits of my world' and Eliot and 'the logos'. It is here that language and metaphor come to the fore. Essentially, he says that all words start life as metaphor (he gives a few choice examples - like Robert Frost using appall in his very white poem 'Design' (a bit of a ripoff of Blake's 'The Tyger' if you ask me). Of course, appall is a metaphor - it once meant 'to make white', as in the sense of blood draining from your face. He sees the role of poets as to not only bring back the original metaphoric meaning of words (a kind of linguistic archaeology), but also to test the limits of just how far you can stretch a metaphor. To be honest, he gives poets far too many roles. The word metaphor is itself a metaphor - it comes from Greek (I was going to say 'the Greek' - but like 'the Lebanon' I've never quite understood why Greek needs to be preceded by a definite article.) and means 'to transfer'. In Greece trolleys are called metaphors - and this is a handy thing to know, as we use metaphors in much the same way we use trolleys - we use them to carry things that are too heavy for us to carry in any other way. A lot of this text is a gushing forth on the joys of poetry. As such, some people might find it a bit hard to take. As someone who has on occasion said things equally gushing (sometimes even equally as daft) about poetry, I didn't mind this at all. But I think I would have said something else about poetry than what is said in this book. Poetry matters because it is the cordial of language - what is left once most of the water has been boiled away. Because it is so concentrated it can't be drunk like water, sometimes it can barely even be sipped. However, the nicest line in this book says something like, 'poetry can not be read, but only re-read'. By repeatedly returning to poems, it is almost as if we are able to dilute the poem finally into something we can drink. Except, of course, we don't dilute the poem at all in this returning - but rather our tastes become accustomed to the richness (sharp and sweet that are beyond piquant and dulcet) that poetic language offers to us. We partake of poetry - it is like a meal we can return to again and again and each return refreshes us. Or as my mate George Herbert would have it, "Have I no harvest but a thorn To let me bloud, and not restore What I have lost with cordiall fruit?" Or not, of course - sometimes poetry is just a smile - because poetry doesn't always aspire to be scripture. What it more often aspires to, I think, is those Buddhist ink paintings where in three strokes of a brush you get the essence of bamboo or of a stork or of something else. It is life as cordial, but mostly it is life. There was a time when I would have liked very much to have been a poet - all the best people do, of course - but I've ended up settling for prose. All the same, I do understand what I've given up in that settling. Poetry does matter, but then sometimes matter does poetry too.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-01-27 00:00:00 David Monroy Why Poetry Matters by Jay Parini - Not a bad book with some good thoughts on why poetry is important to us and to language and society. The author is a huge fan of Dickinson and Frost and the last third of the book is a Frost-centric outpouring of admiration akin to a high school crush that I found not that enjoyable. I will admit that if I ever wrote a book on poetry that I would behave the same way when it came time to write about Lord Byron so it is somewhat excusable.