#steph burt

Poetry does seem to be especially good at certain things. For example, we are all going to die. Poetry can help us live with that.

Everybody wants a piece of me. I have been weighed and measured, tested and standardized, throughout my young life. It happens to everyone, or to everyone with my ability. Now I live quietly and mostly in the dark, amid sawdust and sheer or streaky wooden surfaces. My role, when I reach maturity, may be to help people behave more sociably, and reduce the irritations of summer, or else to make it easier to eat. For reasons I cannot fathom, I weep when it rains. My handlers keep me wrapped in awkward cloth. They will not let me touch my friends or show any curves. They have taught me how to shave. A few twigs and dragonfly wings got caught near the center of me long ago; they serve to distinguish me from others of my kind, along with some bubbles of air. I am worth more when I am clear. When I am most desirable you should be able to see yourself through me. Some of my distant relatives will probably never go far, because they are too irregular, or opaque. Many of us will end on a cart. I, on the other hand, have had my work cut out for me by so many gloves and tongs, pallets and barges, poles and planks that I am sure I will go to New York; there people who own the rights to me will give elaborate thanks to one another, and go on to take me apart.

Poems are made of words, nothing but words. The particulars in poems are like the particularities, the personalities, that distinguish people from one another.

When a poem does what it’s trying to do, what it ought to do, that poem also asks questions that it can’t answer; it asks what doesn’t make sense, what can’t be done, what’s still unreal, as well as validating, claiming, making up, compensating for what we can’t have, what language can’t do, in the literal, instrumental world of plain prose.

Poems can help you say, help you show how you're feeling, but they can also introduce you to feelings, ways of being in the world, people, very much unlike you.

I do think poems are imaginary alternate bodies: they are representations of speaking selves that we could have, even when they do not contain the word ‘I.’ Some poets find that these speaking selves stick close, at their best, to the poet’s real earthly body; others delight in the distance. Many do both, even within the same poem.