Students often go wrong by writing more about the historical background or the life of the poet than about the poem itself. Our social reality is thus enlarged to include relations and facts that have been obscured (not yet discovered) or repressed. I still love these quotes that inspired me as a young poet: Louis Turco says that poetry is "saying something superbly" -, Galway Kinnell says that poetry "cultivates a tenderness towards existence", Joy Harjo says that "if I believed poetry made nothing happen, I wouldn't write it.". They won't discombobulate the young, especially young soldiers, whom Plato warned off poetry lest it remind them of their dirty little fear of death. From something you hear or read about that can spark a new poem, about everything to life's situations and the emotional responses it triggers. Poems such as "The Mill-Race" make us aware of the social conditions that shape our relations; their language helps us dwell in, puzzle out, and feel the conditions and the relations, no matter how terrible, making a change in them more possible. Poetry can leap across and charge the synapse between us and the world, altering both. How can its content not matter? It enacts a central human paradox: we exist as singular selves, yet can only know them through our relations. Suddenly the words do not sound the same or mean the same. James Merrill's poetry has a social function in the sense of "social event": it tries to produce—often, in the face of mortality, or dejection, or bodily ills—a sense that the poet has friends who get his jokes, who share his sense of things, who respond in kind. Late Merrill—the Merrill of "Self-Portrait in Tyvek Windbreaker"—wonders whether his poetry might resound beyond that social group. Solace poetry is to serious poetry as pornography is to serious art. Why exclude ourselves from our own readership? But poetry's the High Art which is also democratic: inexpensive, portable, reproducible, quickly consumed (except for epic and very difficult poetry), requiring only literacy to participate. It is to be a candel in the dark and the the whisper of concience and hope in the depths of despair.What use is poetry?That! Questions of word choice or even the language of the poetry are often informed by social values or, following Jillian Cavanaugh (2009) , social aesthetics (see also Webster 2009 ). Poetry can have an immediate impact in the world. Most people in this world do not read, do not enjoy reading and read only to fulfill concrete educational requirments. Learn how to write a poem about Social media and share it! Meanwhile, the four of us write poems. So our focus on mere use strikes me as odd: is this really all we know about our poems? I believe 9/11 solace poetry has given support, however indirectly and unintentionally, to the Bush administration. PS: Sorry for my bad english, I'v just started to learn this language ;)See you! Yes. Prozac would probably work better. But we should beware of using witness poetry as some cliché of the triumph of the human spirit, providing ourselves with a sop to make us feel better about our government's victims. Stephen Burt: I hope I share Emily Warn's passionate optimism about the scope of our art form, but I either fail to understand, or cannot believe, her argument. Her full-length collections of poetry include The Leaf Path (1982), The Novice Insomniac (1996), and Shadow Architect (2008). Take, for example, bad 9/11 poems, at which I do "sniff the air." For this reason, poetry makes everything (and, yes, nothing) happen, especially in a consumer society prone to assessing and dispensing value to everything from lap dances to teachers' salaries. Even then such literature need only be used with vocabulary and sentence structures found only in common vernacular speech, all other language components should be removed and forbidden. But anyway, let's face it: were Daisy's nineteenth-century poet-revolutionaries alive today, they would be unemployed and writing in obscurity. Lewis, literature not only describes reality but also adds to it. To understand this, it is important to recognise that texts, such as poems, are not created in a vacuum but are the product of many influences that affect the ways in which writers write and the ways in which we read and interpret their work. That's personal—and therefore social. The work, "the curse-gift" of the poet, is to tell the story of a person who has no story other than the story of relations. I doubt most poets, good and bad, political or not, put these demands on their own work. A ceremony allows us to acknowledge a transition or a rite of passage – a new beginning or sometimes, as a conclusion to an event in our lives. A poem creates a presence that is so physically, emotionally, and intellectually charged that we encounter ourselves in our response to it. Now it is the poets who soldier on; they have, after all, paying jobs to perform, not for the republic, but for the realm of the personal which has subsumed it. Our current—our late-Romantic—understanding of poetry (by which all poems are really or fundamentally lyric) posits this binding-together through language alone as poetry's chief goal: poetry becomes that way of using language in which that goal (rather than, say, exposition or persuasion) takes center stage. I would add that poetry takes you into the presence of mystery. Why do we, as poets, find this function of poetry so regrettable? Bad poems are often more useful for healing, persuasion, and celebration than good ones. For this reason, poetry makes everything (and, yes, nothing) happen, especially in a consumer society prone to assessing and dispensing value to everything from lap dances to teachers' salaries. i'm senior in high school and we have senior projects to do mine is on poetry and how it affects a persons mood. These might seem like grand dreams, but it is just such a belief in the power of poetry that spurs my pen to action, whether I am getting paid or not. Today we discussed how people view culture, and what makes people ‘cultured’ or ‘culturally trained’. That's a social function in the sense of "social good," even of "social policy." Maya Angelou, Billy Collins, as well as the more politically-minded poets like Adrienne Rich, Sonia Sanchez, and Palestinian-American poet Suheir Hammad all reach beyond mere aestheticism and challenge accepted notions of the above solipsistic poet toiling away at a few columns of free verse. The next morning Israel bombs a Lebanese village and more than fifty people, most of them children, die. I'm only sorry more poets don't know how to fix toilets, myself included. "I open each session with your poem." The encounter, which occurs in language, preserves and enlarges our solitude and points out our connections. Some people devote their lives to Art Song. That's the moment of poetry; poems exist to let readers share in that moment. I wrote it in classical and modern Chinese and English. i would greatly appreciate itthank youBeka, Originally Published: December 28th, 2006. Poets, he's saying, weld new relations and add new forms to the world. In novels, poetry, social commentary, and the like, where language plays such an important role, we are able to briefly overlook the implication of cultural dissonance. The only literature that should be allowed to exist is that which aggrandizes whichever government regime is in power at any given time in order to induce patriotic rapture. Compared to the writing of poetry, few other human activities take place so widely, at least in America, absent even a tacit consensus as to why we do them, what good they do, what function they serve. 3 Poetry matters. What about reading my great-grandmother's love letters, reading Studs Terkel's oral histories, contemplating Brancusi's "Bird in Flight"? Thank Heavens I vote Democrat!" "The Mill-Race" by Anne Winters serves as proof text. I continue to maintain that poetry cannot be defined in terms of a social function at all, even if (and here Emily Warn and I agree) most of the great modern poets do project visions of self which imply paradoxical communities of solitude, social in one sense, antisocial in another. For her, the poem has value and purpose because it says something meaningful to her. And when, on the carved lapis lazuli, a man "asks for mournful melodies;/Accomplished fingers begin to play;/...their eyes,/Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay." Does it disclose the pathos of other human beings and the source of their suffering? When you read a lot of contemporary poetry, you discover that the presumed or stated, implicit or explicit, social function of poetry (if any) varies wildly with the poet. Is anyone else I know? In this way poetry can be a vehicle for messages of social justice. Major Jackson: Daisy Fried wonders why poetry is called to duty, why it "is asked to do more than be itself," especially during moments of political or national crisis. If there are universal truths about the communicative functions in poems—truths about all good poems, not just about "The Mill-Race"—they are so universal that they do not count as social, by my lights: they concern communication among just two persons at a time, whether the two meet face-to-face, or whether implicit author and genuine reader live thousands of years apart. In contrast, Emerson claims that "Poets are...liberating gods." Pyrotechnic poets, such as Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and Adrienne Rich, set a charge that reverberates among multitudes, changing the shape of our social relations and, inescapably, our individual and collective consciousness. The function of poetry is that it does not have any function beyond its own construction and being-in-the-world. No question about it. An epigram, is a poem that is meant to be funny or satirical. I used to love poetry so much that I majored in Chinese literature. Oral poetry is a wide subject that ranges from American 'folk-songs', Eskimo lyrics or popular songs, to the heroic poems of Homer and distinct epic composers in Asia and the Pacific. Is it a useful poem? The readerly self, if the music and strategies of the poem are a success, fades away to assume the speaker's identity, or the poem's psychic position. "Compared to the writing of poetry, few other human activities take place so widely, at least in America, absent even a tacit consensus as to why we do them, what good they do, what function they serve.". We're talking about a global village with a YouTube tech resource beyond standard TV, films and video-on-demand. Poetry is so important because it helps us understand and appreciate the world around us. Copyright © 2007 - 2021 Revision World Networks Ltd. The capital city Kathmandu enjoys a rich tapestry of cultures blending to form a national identity. No. Ah, but poetry binds our solitudes, creating this self-encounter which becomes paradoxically social, through language alone. Ammons's poems about inlets, woods, and garbage.) The quote perfectly describes the importance of poetry in a human being’s life. It is a vehicle for cultural survival. We are more likely to experience great visual art in the presence of others (in museums); we might say such experience connects us more evidently than can the silent reading of verse whose authors we have never met. Emily Warn: Stephen Burt's logic is airtight. And students I've had, not writing students, but those non-English majors taking perhaps the only English class they'll ever take, have found themselves reflected in poems, much to their surprise. But do all poems do this? The quikest way to lose the respect of friends, family and colleagues is to write poetry for them. Stephanie (also Steph; formerly Stephen) Burt is a poet, literary critic, and professor. Great poems don't always fit categories of usage: Martial's hilariously filthy invectives, Dickinson's apolitical lyrics, and, despite their stupid fascism, Pound's Cantos, all function as great poetry. Other forms of art and literature need not exist. Just ask the poet who reluctantly agrees to contribute to a wedding program, a funeral, or a political rally: the assignment pales in comparison to those poems that arise out of his own mysterious and idiosyncratic need. Do other forms of art and work carry out this same task? Poetry is a way to understand how language and symbol systems work. Exposing oneself to good literary works, is equivalent to providing one with the finest of … I try to teach my students the full magnitude of what can happen during the reading of a poem. Poetry and the sentiments involved in it do not serve the function of obtaining employment and food, housing and procreation, do not increase one's social standing and on many occasion cause discord among people due the intense opinions and sentements involved in it; this meaning one may read one's writing and be offended by the thought, image or opinion expressed in such writing. As Celan wrote, "I am you / if I am." Martín Espada, John Yau, and Nikki Finney are just a few of many poets who write poetry that "embraces experience in its full complexity," yet their books never receive a nod in Poetry. Poetry teaches us how to live. A headline swims into sight: "Shooting at Jewish Federation Offices Leaves 1 Dead, 5 Wounded." Stephen Burt: What is the social function of poetry? However, this is not to say the sole purpose of poetry is to serve as social commentary. Indeed, as Daisy says, "we are all on the bus." The difference between solace porn and sex porn is that solace pornographers seldom seem aware that they're making pornography. Of plumbing and carpentry? True revolutionary poets are stripped of their laureateships or never reviewed in these pages, for some reason probably having to do with the worn-out argument of lack of aesthetic worth or little merit. If one lesbian or gay student lives, does not consider suicide because they've found themselves reflected in a poem, that's pretty social. Emerson named the current flowing through things divine—a fire our bodies and poems externalize. "The Mill-Race" is good and usefulbecause it presents in extraordinary language an aspect of the human condition, not some false solution having to do with feel-good "relat(ing) to drained faces." Since then, travelling at least a small portion of this world and living abraod, indulging myself in the languages and literatures of the wider part of East Asia, as well as talking with a great many people, I have come a realization. Even when the Establishment posthumously highlights a poet such as June Jordan, whose poetics and social vision coalesce into a rich model of the best of art created in a democracy, and whose poetry never suffers from mere narcissism, it does so patronizingly (see Dan Chiasson's review in these pages, November 2005). Is my Talmud teacher among the wounded or dead? If we use any more conventional, more restrictive senses for "social"—for example, "having to do with a particular society taken as a whole," or even "having to do with people in large groups"—then there is no social function which all good poems have. Modern society isn't just a few billion people. It is to facilitate communication and understanding on the deepest level, to resist tranny and oppression, to commune on the deepest levels, and to sing for all that is just and good in the world. The kind of poetry written to make us feel better, for example, after 9/11, is pro-establishment falsification, for it lets us pull the comforter back over our heads and go on sleeping. The student's poem reflects the cultural context of the mask. Emerson thought poems could change reality because they uncover its hardwiring, then jimmy with it. Powell's poems about living and loving with HIV, or A.R. Cultural relationship. If that is what Emily means, I accept her claim, with two demurrers. In "Lapis Lazuli," Yeats insists on the gaiety of human existence alongside its tragedy. Art of witness is essential. Favorite Line/s: … We shouldn't denigrate this capacity, no matter how much we are being paid. It is truly another language exclusively for the writer and the reader. 2 Words matter. This is poetry's social value. I'm not pooh-poohing poetry of witness, quite the opposite. Classical literary works serve as a food for thought and encourage imagination and creativity. What can be commonly said about a skeptic who turns for clarity to a Rae Armantrout poem, a plumber who searches on Yahoo for a wedding toast, a harried person who seeks in poetry refuge from a grueling job, or a Guantanamo prisoner who, denied pen and paper, uses pebbles to scratch poems on Styrofoam cups? If a poem has something to say and says it well, it will be remembered. If so, let me add another: one of poetry's chief aims is to illumine the walls of mystery, the inscrutable, the unsayable. Dmitri Shostakovich faced (and sometimes tried to satisfy) the demands of Soviet musical realism. Both poets want to say something about a society, and both poets want to do something we might call "social"—to imagine, and to cause, some sense of relations that extend beyond one-on-one intimacy—but they differ in what they want to do, and in why. Such a position is necessary to our communal health. Comparison of Poetry of a Different Culture We live in a society where culture and identity are very important. Daisy Fried: Why not a summation made up of parts? Good 9/11 poems sustain the possibility that America was both victim and guilty. Literary works are portrayals of the thinking patterns and social norms prevalent in society. Milton's sonnet against the Long Parliament). Maybe no one asks mezzo-sopranos to justify their work in terms of purported political utility, but composers have long encountered such demands. I'll hazard an answer. Certainly many poems—one might say all good poems—have this effect. It occurs in every culture and from every age. The function of War and Peace is greater than its many uses. This is particularly important when comparing two writers and will be rewarded by the examiner. It is great to be in such a diversifed group.Needless to say, for those 2 hours, once a week meetings are mind opening to new thought patterns of how the individuals process their creativity.A full range of emotions it encompasses.Inspiration from the spoken word can come from everyday conversations. Anne Winters's "The Mill-Race," about office workers in lower Manhattan, contains virtuoso description of the urban scene: workers, weather, light, limos of the bosses, buses of the employees. As stated in the quote by C.S. Your, Raiul Baztepo. Here It is well known that post-Independence India has produced many brilliant writers whose writings have their own The ‘social, historical and cultural’ contexts can consist of a variety of factors. 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