Poetry frightens. Over the years when it has come up in conversation that we write poems, dozens of people from all walks of life have paused and then diffidently or straightforwardly confided that poetry means nothing to them. We have heard in those various voices puzzlement, anger, longing, contempt, and very often a note of betrayal, of having been denied a right that goes with speaking, reading, and writing a language. They have shaken their heads, as if to forswear the very notion of poetry.
In truth, poetry--to a degree--should frighten. Poems cannot be condensed, systematized, or quantified. Poetry concisely registers on the nerves the whole skein of human emotions. It harrows, enthralls, awes, dazzles, confides. As the African-American poet Walter Dancy has written, "A poet is a mind sailor soul dweller and teller of heartbeats." Poetry in the words of Langston Hughes is "the human soul entire, squeezed like a lemon or lime, drop by drop, into atomic words." According to Nobel prize winner Joseph Brodsky, "Poetry is essentially the soul's search for its release in language."
These are heady definitions but not unfocused ones. Although all three poets use the word "soul," there is nothing fuzzy about that word. The soul is the depth of our being and poetry is one means of sounding that depth. To be sure, not every poem seeks that intensity but as the lives and works of many poets show, poetry emphatically embraces that quest. It isn't fainthearted. It isn't an aspirin or a tonic. It isn't entertainment. A poem doesn't wile away time; it engages our fleetingness and makes it articulate. It seizes time and shapes it.
