I'm gonna keep this short because I want to know what you folks have to say about the question I'm posing in my blog. This is something I've been wondering about for the last quarter because I read a shitload of poetry that was written for a very specific purpose. With that being said, I'll just get right into it.
Writing poetry for the sake of writing poetry is a fairly
new phenomenon. In the past, writing verse was chiefly something one did for a
very specific reason. If you pick up an anthology of English Renaissance verse,
you’ll find a lot of commissioned poetry (i.e. epithalamion, shit about the
church, etc.) and poetry that was written – to put it crudely, though perhaps
in the way a modern Marvell or Donne would put it – to get pussy. Other poems were written to commemorate
events. This sort of poetry, in particular, is all over the place in early American
poetry. However, most of the poetry I read today isn’t setting out to do these
types of things (an exception of this, though, is the poetry of witness).
So, why do you guys write poetry? What is it that compels you
to put pen to paper? Personally, I’ve recently been writing some poems that
deal with physics. A lot of these poems are attempts for people to embrace
scientific principles. I recently wrote
a poem about the Schrödinger’s cat experiment. I did this because I really like
that particular experiment and because there is a lot to be said about the
poetic implications of the experiment as a whole. When I read it at our last
poetry reading, only one or two people in the audience knew what the experiment
was. Since then, I’ve decided that my next collection of poetry will be based
around science so that my friends, most of whom are poetry fanatics, may become
more interested in thinking about things like theoretical physics.
This is sort of a unique endeavor, though; and, as far as I
know, most modern poetry isn’t seeking to do something like that. So, please,
let me know what you guys are hoping to accomplish through your work. I know
that poetry is often something that people do because of therapeutic reasons,
but surely some of you write it for reasons other than that, right? Let me know
your thoughts.
J
