WHY POETRY? We asked the four international nominees for the prize a simple question. Here’s what they said:
Tongo Eisen-Martin, Heaven is All Goodbyes (City Lights)
I write poetry for the sake of exploring compounded insights and discovering new patterns of logic. I write poetry to expand the possibilities of my perception and those who read it. I write poetry to embrace and play with my internal chatter; muting, exaggerating, treasuring, making fun of, stressing, and relaxing all of its various voices. And hopefully write poems that bring people to the possibility of invincibility in every moment no matter how violent, traumatic, chaotic and unfair. I write poetry to walk towards my subconscious and return with music.
Susan Howe, Debths (New Directions)
“And so it was I entered the broken world/ To trace the visionary company of love, its voice/ An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled).” That’s Hart Crane in his last poem “The Broken Tower.”
Why Poetry? Because it’s necessary. Poetry is both revelation and calling. Poetry provides a reader with a secret sense of peace, or is it a furious calm. Art traces repairs and offers harmony where future meets present in this our unknown universe. Almost like field recording.
Layli Long Soldier, Whereas (Graywolf Press)
I do not have to provide a thesis and prove the point; I can lay bare the image and allow the reader to interpret on their own terms. If an experience has been confusing, for example, the poem allows for that selfsame confusion, fragmentation and slippage; in some cases, this can actually serve as the engine or power of a poem. Paradoxically, a poem is where I can think things out, while at the same time I do not have to reach a tidy conclusion. I can think a thing through as far as I can take it, then hand the reins over to the reader to continue thinking on their own, imaginatively … Most of all, for me, writing a poem is an enactment of prayer; it embodies hope, longing and constant trust in the unseen.
Natalie Shapero, Hard Child (Copper Canyon Press)
Poetry offers the opportunity to be declarative without being definitive, to train attention on the murky and uncertain things that enrapture, enrage or engulf us. In a world where so much of our everyday discourse revolves around staking out positions and digging in hard, many of my favourite poems revel in assertions that cannot be verified by evidence, or that evidence explicitly contravenes. The poems then invite us to respond not by attacking these debatable premises, but instead by temporarily imagining ourselves into a world in which they might come true. Why, we ask ourselves, did the poet bring us here? And therein comes the insight. This is one of the things I love about poetry: its investigation of contradictory impulses and its stubborn embrace of tension, in worlds both outside and in.