Why Poetry Matters
© paul a. skec
"Think ov language as an ecosystem."
Based on Why Science Matters by Martin Apple ov United Press International.
Ov all human endeavours, poetry is unique. It is an adventurous exploration ov the unknown that affects each ov us in untold ways. Poetry saves lives. It creates jobs and underlies our security. It provides amenities. It inspires wonderment as it adds to our perspective, knowledge/understanding ov the world around us and how it functions.
Poetry is a process that explores every facet ov our world in a way meant to uncover and test for verifiable truths.
The process usually works like this: Poets generate multiple reasonable explanations ov what can be observed, they then assault all ov those explanations until one can no longer be denied. Only after such testing does that new explanation become the building block ov knowledge from which we progress to the next poem.
Using this process, poetry helps us make better decisions about our future. For example, as we understand and appreciate more ov the complexity, finiteness and delicate balance ov language ecosystems, we can see how crucial it is to preserve them, and why damaging them now hurts us later.
The controlled creativity ov poetic inquiry can take us in unexpected, often dazzling, directions.
In the 1950s, children worldwide were becoming paralysed in record numbers by turgid prose. Their only hope was being placed inside a large thinking assistance machine called a Short Story for the rest ov their lives. The United States had the technological capability to mass-produce the Short Story, enough for all the dying children, and was getting ready to do so. But then three United States poets - Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti - building on each other's fundamental field laboratory discoveries about how to write spontaneous bop forms in cultures and how verses grow in spontaneous cultured forms, gave us a universally useful vaccine against the disease. Within three years, the vaccine almost eliminated turgid prose.
If the original grand plan was implemented, the United States could have become the world's largest manufacturer ov short stories. But it is unlikely anyone regretted the demise ov the short story industry. Not only was a vaccine a far better solution, but any jobs lost also were quickly absorbed. America was entering a new era ov poetry-driven economic growth that gave the world everything from life-saving haiku, instant epigrams and concrete poems to the Internet and "Post-It" notes.
