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Allison G wrote: >The problem really is, for anyone troubled by how the world is, how to face poetry's uselessness squarely and honestly (that's what I liked about Keston Sutherland's article in a recent Jacket). It's a fine line between understanding its necessity - which I believe - and kidding ourselves...< This is a subject which comes up often, so I thought I'd put my bib in. For me poetry is useful. The reading of it woke me up to a different world than the Irish-Catholic household (comfortable, thank you) which I grew up in. Maybe it wasn't just poetry but literature, but poetry has always been the pinnacle of lit for me. A delight in the physical world started with Gerard Manley Hopkins and was ignited again by Basho. A kind of delight in working with people (I was a shy one) came through the Beats, and a wish to help my fellow man came from the Buddhism that reading the Beats brought me to. Even as far as economics via Pound, and questions of converting to different religions by Eliot and Lowell and Les Murray. The writing of poetry brings me out of my shell and into the world. I know that's paradoxical, especially from the neo-romanticism of a lot of my work, but my world is interlaced with poetry, poets and bookish activities. When I care what happens to Afghan citizens it is not my early Catholicism that informs that emotion, but my paperback-Buddhism and my political stance first prompted by the Beats when I was an impressionable young man. (Still am impressionable.) So, to each of us, isn't poetry useful? Sure I can't buy groceries with it, or put out a fire - but I can do those things with the money I make from teaching which is a direct spinoff of my writing & publishing poetry. (I put out the fire with an extinguisher, if you were wondering ...) I suppose I am talking 'literature' here, but my experience with it, as my bookshelves would attest to, is mainly preoccupied with poetry. For me, poetry is useful. And that's the nub of my thesis: for me. Poetry is useful to certain individuals in the world - many many thousands - as a switchboard through which to engage with the 'real world'. Here we are on a partyline, and I have learnt a lot from many of you (thank you), but I wouldn't be here if I hadn't read Milton's Sonnet on His Blindness when I was a teenager - then On the Road, Howl, Cantos, Waste Land, etc. Other people engage with the world and its peoples through computing, selling shoes, or playing cricket (my children's occupations and passions): poetry does it for me. I have escaped a need to own material things through poetry; I have escaped a limiting religious view through poetry; and I have been released from a very limited view of love through literature ... Compression is an element of poetry which I highly admire, so I will stop now and let you get on with your day. I'll just ask all of you, How has poetry influenced the shape of your life? Was that useful? Andrew ---------------------------------------- Andrew Burke Copywriting [log in to unmask] Creative Writing http://www.bam.com.au/andrew/ Editing ----------------------------------------