Why So Few of Us Read Poetry

What is the purpose of poetry?

Poetry is a special type of writing. All writing is for the purpose of communication, connecting with others, but poetry has the power of marrying our intelligence and our feelings and thereby creating insight with a very few words.

We need something to live for. Joy, fun, humor, beauty, love, kindness, tenderness, any of the positive qualities will do. The modern poets of the world could have helped us to see these qualities in nature, each other or in God. They could have given us a vision of something to live for. This was the sacred possibility entrusted to the gifted poets among us. Instead of pointing the way to what makes life worth living, however, most modern poets chose, negativity, chaos, confusion, dense, impenetrable wordiness or cleverness. For the most part, modern poets have failed their sacred trust.

If you don't believe this assessment, go to The American Bookseller's Exchange (ABEbooks.com) and order A Little "Treasury" of Modern Poetry (my quotation marks). As of this writing, there is one there for $3.66, free shipping, not a bargain. They should pay you! Of course there are exceptions, but most of the poems in this "treasury" -- selected to be the greatest of modern times--are almost impossible to understand and way too wordy and/or negative. Instead of inspiring, enriching or uplifting, they confuse and discourage. They should have gone right in the wastebasket, and that is exactly where my "treasury" is going.

Having written the above, I find it way too negative, making me look like a grump, so that I become part of the problem. Let me swim back up from the murky depths of negativism towards the light. Having thrown away a book of indigestible poems, I immediately picked up another one: Almost Home, new and selected poems by Sue Scalf. There is just one thing good enough I can say about this book: They are poems that make life worth living!