Alluring words can add meaning to life

describe this world we are all trying to understand.

Poetry is a name for the pleasure we take in the language we hear and speak, read and write. We savor words for how they sound and what they mean, the wonderful alchemy of their sound and sense together, no matter how practical or mundane their uses.

We find poetry in poems, of course — “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” and “My soul has grown deep like the rivers” — but we find it elsewhere, too. In this column, you’ll encounter some traditional (and some nontraditional) poems. But I also hope the words used can welcome you to the pleasures and challenges — the poetry — of words, wherever we find them.

Readers of poetry tend to divide along similar lines, as the poet and critic James Fenton has observed. There are “those who, confronted with what appears to be like a code, insist that they must crack it, and those who are happy to listen to the spell. ...”

That “spell,” as Fenton calls it, was cast on all of us long ago — the spell not only of poetry but of words themselves. Poetry happens — in metaphors or jokes or in poems themselves. We might not realize that we are under the spell of poetry, because poetry is made of ordinary language (if language can ever be ordinary). Some words we use to toast a wedding or to bless the dead; others we use to order a pizza.

Language is the medium of our speech and thought and being, so it is natural to take pleasure in it. It is also natural to take that same pleasure — not to mention its profundity — for granted.

Stare at any word for a while, say it again and again to yourself, and it becomes a foreign language. Its meaning bleeds from it, and the word reclaims its original, utter strangeness.

“Every word was once a poem,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1844. “Every new relation is a new word.” Twenty years ago, the word bling was just a clever nugget of slang from a half-forgotten hip-hop song of the 1980s.

Now, thanks to the Cash Money Millionaires and digital media, we can find it in the Oxford English Dictionary. It is a part of speech, a kind of poetry.

Poetry is a name for the pleasure of language; it is also a way of trying to name the world. Yes, poetry offers us pleasure, but it can also offer much more.

I believe that poetry can help us make meaning of our lives and those of others.

Simple sounds in the air or marks on a page become profound human comedy and tragedy, the scripts for our most beautiful and awful acts. These marks and sounds can be “Hamlet,” Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” or Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”

And, 20 years after first falling in love with poetry, I still find it miraculous how those marks and sounds remain my way of making sense of my world, of myself and of you — stranger, reader, friend.

Not everyone read poems. Not all of us need poems. We all need poetry, though, because we need language. We need to communicate, and we also need the pleasure and meaning it can offer our lives.

This is why I want to share poetry with you in whatever form we might find it. I hope you find some of it in this column. I hope you find even more in the words you hear and those you speak every day.

There and here, I hope you will find a kind of poetry that you can love, or even some that you have loved all along.