The significance and solace of poetry is closer than you think, I tell budding authors as they arrive at class with headphones on, glued to TikTok trends, or scrolling through Instagram feeds. Given their youth, they begin to air archaic ideas about what poetry is: something that’s difficult to decipher, hard to write. Asked to name a poet, their minds often retreat into the historical darkness where they locate Shakespeare.
Perhaps a name surfaces from an era a little closer to our own – Emily Dickinson, say, or Sylvia Plath. It’s then I offer them Dua Lipa and Benson Boone, and screen YouTube videos of “ New Rules ” and “ Beautiful Things ”. Poetry originated in oral narrative, after all.
Long before Gutenburg invented the printing press, long before the Sumerians and others developed script, humans entertained and educated, connected and comforted one another through the lyrical word. Whether short, memorised stories exchanged between the poor and uneducated, ancestral endeavours retold at community gatherings, or epics recited for the delectation of royal courts, poetry was global and democratic. It still is.
Poetic celebrity Poetry was also a forum for messaging with a significant reach. Sex, sexuality, love, morality, law, wrongdoing, mutiny ..
. nothing was taboo for poetic exploration and dissemination. Yes, even false, imagined or speculative portrayals of the proclivities of the powerful and privileged.
Fake news indeed. Publishing eventually set storie.