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  • Necessary Utterance:On Poetry As a Cultural Force
  • Natasha Trethewey (bio)

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Despair about the place of poetry in American culture is nothing new. Writing for the North American Review in 1936, poet Joseph Auslander—in part lamenting the national state of things, “the tumultuous times” (as George Orwell might have put it) of his historical moment, and perhaps responding to the usual dismissals of the role of poetry in American life—declared:

…with progress and machine comfort and buttons and buzzers and contraptions and clever paraphernalia and infallible statistics and the deification of Fact, we are swinging back full circle to a very old and a very simple truth. We are being compelled, by the abject collapse of a material conception of living, to recognize once more the terrible necessity in our lives for that strength, that pillaring of the spirit, that informing and sustaining power which it has always been the special virtue and splendor of poetry to impart.

It’s easy to see that Auslander’s words could have been describing our own contemporary moment with its technological advances and myriad distractions. A year later, he would become the first Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, already having articulated in his essay the role he would assume: “to help put [poetry] back where it belongs in the lives and affections and affairs of our people.” belief in the necessity of poetry—and contemporary poetry in particular—is evident in his assertion that it communicates the “thought and feeling of our age to the people.” “To have poets,” Auslander declared, “we have audiences. … And to have great poets, we must have great audiences,” thus reminding us of the symbiotic relationship contemporary readers and writers. That a poem had saved nations in the past was, to “beside the point.” Poetry, he insisted, “will do so again. When everything else fails, poetry will remain. Poetry cannot fail.”

Poetry cannot fail, yet the role of poetry waxes and wanes in the lives of many people. We turn to it when we need it. In the face of tragedy, reading poetry may serve as not only our silent reflection, but also our uttered lament, a container for our collective loss. Poetry possesses a cultural force in its ability to give shape to what we have witnessed and therefore inevitably must be articulated. For example, “Photograph from September 11” by the late Wisława Szymborska:

They jumped from the burning floors—one, two, a few more,higher, lower.

The photograph halted them in life,and now keeps themabove the earth toward the earth.

Each is still complete,with a particular faceand blood well hidden.

There’s enough timefor hair to come loose,for keys and coinsto fall from pockets.

They’re still within the air’s reach,within the compass of placesthat have just now opened.

I can do only two things for them—describe this flightand not add a last line.

How plainspoken this necessary utterance: The poem’s power is also in its sense of justice, its ability to witness without trivializing what happened with a “poetic” ending. It remembers without diminishing.

We do not turn to poetry, however, only when we are grieving. Though we may forget it for a while, we return again when we need the language of a poem to help us commemorate the birth of a child, to celebrate a marriage, speak to the beloved in heightened terms in order to convey the depths of our emotional attachment. At these times many of us turn to the act of writing poems. [End Page 55]

Either way, to be a reader or writer of poetry is to recognize the ways in which it is a cultural force, to believe in the necessity of it. Like Auslander, I believe in that necessity now more than ever, but it would not be wholly true to say that I have been here all along, at least not consistently. To have arrived at this point of certainty, or, more precisely, at a point of faith in poetry to give us something necessary that cannot...

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