The Case for Poetry When Nobody Seems to Have Time
We live in an era of relentless information. News, commentary, social media posts, newsletters, podcasts, long-reads — content arrives faster than anyone can process it. In this environment, poetry can seem like a curious relic: slow, demanding, often ambiguous, resistant to the quick skim.
And yet poetry persists. It is read, written, shared, memorized, and returned to in ways that other forms of writing rarely are. There must be something it offers that nothing else quite can.
What Poetry Does That Prose Cannot
The poet and critic Michael Donaghy once observed that a poem is a machine for remembering itself. Unlike a news article or an essay, a well-made poem lodges in the memory — its rhythms and sounds creating hooks that prose simply doesn't have. This is not an accident. It is what poetry is for.
But beyond memorability, poetry offers several things that prose struggles to achieve:
- Compression — a single line can hold what a paragraph cannot, not by leaving things out but by making every word bear more weight
- Ambiguity as a feature, not a bug — a good poem means more than one thing simultaneously, and holds those meanings in tension
- An encounter with language itself — poetry makes us notice how words sound, how they sit next to each other, what they carry beyond their dictionary definitions
- A different relationship with time — reading a poem requires slowing down, which is itself a form of resistance to the current
Poetry and Political Life: The Kaczmarski Example
One of the most compelling arguments for poetry's continuing relevance is the role it has played — and continues to play — in political and social life. In Poland under communism, the songs of Jacek Kaczmarski, dense with literary allusion and historical reference, circulated on underground cassette tapes and gave voice to experiences that official culture refused to acknowledge.
This is not unique to Poland. From Pablo Neruda to Seamus Heaney, from Wisława Szymborska to Mahmoud Darwish, poets have repeatedly found ways to say what journalists cannot — not because they are more courageous, necessarily, but because the indirect, metaphorical nature of poetry can sometimes reach places that direct statement cannot.
The Objection: "I Don't Understand It"
The most common reason people give for avoiding poetry is that they find it incomprehensible. This is almost always a problem of approach rather than ability. Poetry is not a puzzle to be solved. The question is not "what does this mean?" but "what does this do to me? What does it make me notice or feel?"
A useful starting point: read a poem aloud, even if you're alone. Poetry was, for most of human history, an oral art. It needs to be heard, not just seen on the page. Many poems that seem opaque on the silent page open up the moment you give them voice.
Finding Your Way In
If you want to (re)engage with poetry but don't know where to start, consider these approaches:
- Start with poets who are known for clarity and directness — Philip Larkin, Mary Oliver, Wisława Szymborska in translation
- Read collections of translated poetry — it broadens your sense of what poetry can be and do
- Follow one poem for a week — read it every day and see how your understanding shifts
- Don't worry about "getting it right" — your response to a poem is not a test
A Final Thought
In an age when so much content is designed to be consumed and forgotten, poetry insists on being returned to. It rewards patience and attention — two qualities that are increasingly rare and increasingly valuable. That alone seems like a sufficient reason to give it another chance.