We recently celebrated World Poetry Day, which gives poets, both public and private, a day in the sun. It also renews old conversations about why poetry might be important and whether all poems should rhyme.
The first question gained some impetus when Amanda Gorman, the United States Youth Poetry Laureate read her poem ‘The Hill we Climb’ at the inauguration of President Biden. Not only was she young, confident, alive and dressed by Prada, but both the poem itself and the reading of it took the Inauguration to new depth. ‘The Hill we Climb’ was a personal imagining of the urgency, the cost and the importance of unifying the nation. It was Amanda’s dream, but the craft with which she wrote and spoke it made it a universal dream. It invited its hearers to the inauguration not only as a political event but as a human event.
Poetry can do that. Good poems catch the human depth of all our encounters: with ourselves, with the people we love, the world around us, with politics, science and all else. They do it by inviting their writers to explore the depths of their own gifts, and especially the gift of words, of rhythm and sound, of memory and of silence. Amanda Gorman’s poem is notable for its rhythm. The many rhymes, repetitions and the strong emphasis on the last word of each line are reminiscent of rap, a poetic language drawn from the Black American culture that Amanda inherited. From these she crafted her personal statement of hope in hard times spoken in the name of the nation.
'And yet the dawn is ours
before we knew it
Somehow we do it
Somehow we've weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn't broken
but simply unfinished.'
By bringing together the personal and the public the poem ensured that the meaning of the event was held in memory. That is a central business of poetry. The Iliad and La Chanson de Roland, for example, both described memorable conflicts that would now be dismissed as of no more than local interest. Of course, poems about public events do not always meet the mark — among the worst poems of British Poet Laureates have often been those to do with such national events as royal coronations or marriages. In a good poem of the genre, the writer will be deeply involved, skilful, and will describe an event of high significance. The personal and the public must meet in the writing of the poem.
What is lost in the public telling of significant public events is the range and depth of the relationships involved. These include the relationships between persons, places, past and present. The complexity and the delicacy of these relationships, and so the irreducible value of each human being involved in them, are often eradicated when private interests or political power tell events in a grossly simplified way. Good poetry can both clarify and purify the public memory by paying attention to the personal and public depth of events.
This telling of events in a way that respects the public context and personal depth was critical in Stalin’s Russia where the public language was controlled by the terror of the purges in a way that was deeply disrespectful of personal value and of the truth of public relationships.
Much published poetry of the time gilded this telling by meretricious images and bombastic rhetoric. Other poets fought against this bastardisation of poetry. In the prologue to her poem cycle Requiem Anna Akhmatova stated clearly the importance, the dire circumstances and the exigent mission of the poet.
‘During the terrifying Yezhov time I spent seventeen months in Leningrad prison lines. One time, someone thought they recognized me. Then a woman standing behind me, who of course had never heard my name, stirred from the stupor common to us all and asked in my ear (there, everyone whispered), “Can you describe this?” I said, “I can”. Then something like a smile crossed what had once been her face.’
In a few lines Akhmatova describes the agony of the disappearances of relatives during the purges, the proscription of words that communicate, the calling of the poet to describe both the personal and the public reality so that it will be held in public memory.
In such circumstances the importance of poetry lay in its capacity to give a free and rich description in a world where all was controlled and impoverished. Poets had to keep their eyes open and their heart steeled to record new depths of horror. Nadezhda Mandelstam’s two volumes of reminiscences, Hope against Hope and Hope Destroyed tells of her life with the poet Osip Mandelstam until his exile and death under Stalin. At a deeper level it is a saga of her discovery of the depth of public and personal corruption of Russia and a parsing of Osip’s poems that inscribe his mission as poet in such a society.
'The poets assume that even if no one reads the poem, the care invested in remembrance is of more than personal value.'
Mandelstam and Akhmatova were poets in extremis. Poetry also plays this same purifying and exigent role in other societies. Bruce Dawe’s poem A Victorian Hangman Tells his Love tells the story of Ronald Ryan, the last man to be hanged in Victoria in the midst of great controversy. Dawe focused on the political calculus that people were more moved by ghoulish fascination with the hanging than with the victim. His poem imagines a hangman’s love letter addressed to his victim. The concluding lines of the poem expose the public vision in which Ronald Ryan is a morsel to be tossed to the crowd. They also make evident his absence as a person:
'Be assured, you will sink into the generous pool of public feeling
as gently as a leaf—accept your role, feel chosen.
You are this evening's headlines. Come, my love.'
Although few poets are published, and fewer poems are written with intent to purify language, many unnoticed poems are concerned to remember and represent the immediacy of relationships that would otherwise be forgotten. The poets assume that even if no one reads the poem, the care invested in remembrance is of more than personal value. It is as if the poem that honours a person or event in this way will be joined to a hidden river of poetry where they will be forever held.
Much anonymous poetry tries to find words for massive suffering whose victims are inevitably faceless. One such poem reflects on the fate of Vietnamese refugees who fled by sea only to be were killed in their thousands by Thai pirates. The writer imagines flying over the South China Sea, looking down over the lights of fishing boats and musing on the fate of a young Vietnamese woman. It is an act of memory honouring her in the terrible end of her life while opening the possibility of life beyond her disappearance.
'… And you, little sister,
salted, fried and shaken,
as you sailed,
did you smile
to see these lights
alluring you,
like tunnies,
to frenzy
of paddles, flails and knives?
Or did you wait in fear,
drifting on the unmarked sea?
In this black box,
little sister,
I record your pain
until we land.'
The stream of poetry is a stream of memory in which memories are constantly celebrated and retold in another key. The theme of the Iliad is the sadness of war, an epic poem about what we might see as a minor skirmishes, which is large in its evocation of personal relationships and the broader context of Gods and human fates. It inspired the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh’s sonnet about two farmers who came to blows over the boundary between their stony farms. He remembers the poverty of the land, the passion of the protagonists, and then asks himself how to compare this scuffle against the contemporaneous Munich pact in 1938. He concludes the poem:
'I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.'
Truth be told, all human events and the relationships that compose them have their own importance. Poems honour it, even if they do not rhyme.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street, and writer at Jesuit Social Services.
Main image: Amanda Gorman speaks during the inauguration of U.S. President-elect Joe Biden (Rob Carr/Getty Images)