In Defense of Poetry

There’s a beautiful line from Pablo Neruda that has stayed with me since the first time I heard it: “And it was at that age… poetry arrived in search of me…” The first time I heard it, I didn’t quite get what the poet meant. It was only later when I realized that my heart understood all along what took my brain so long to figure out: that poetry was a language that called out to me.

From a young age, I began writing poetry simply because a friend of mine tried it and I thought: I can do that too. Of course, I thought then that the trick was in simply rhyming words and trying to make a story out of them. In college, I realized that it wasn’t only beautiful words and images that called out to me; it was the secret world that opened up once I’d learned to unlock the mysteries of the poem.

When I began teaching poetry, I realized that the “unlocking the mysteries of the poem” was not intuitive for some students. They actually had to be given concrete steps and lots of examples because they hadn’t been as naturally exposed to it as some of their other classmates. In all my years of teaching, however, there’s nothing quite like witnessing the exact moment a student is able to unlock a text and see the look of pure wonder that crosses his face because he has gained a new insight about the world and life in it.

In this day and age when the world keeps asking young people to innovate and invent and think outside the box, some might question whether teaching (and loving) poetry is still relevant at all. Science and math, I think, are the language of the human brain – its attempt to put order in the universe, to seek ways to solve problems through a clear method and empirical evidence tested throughout time.

Poetry and the arts are languages of the soul – its attempt to make sense of the sometimes chaotic world of feelings and relationships, to seek not to solve problems but to understand the self and in some instances the other. More and more I begin to see that the humanities are not in aid to learning, they are in fact, the very heart of education. It is important to teach our young people to live easier, more comfortable lives with technology and to find success in their profession so that they can serve others. But it is more important to teach our young people to find meaning and joy in their relationships, to take a look at what’s within before they get lost in the noise around. In other words, before we can teach our young people to live well, we need to teach them to really live.