riggie, this one's for you. in the NY times today there's an opinion piece by Seamus Heaney (winner of the Nobel Prize in literature 1995) about the impact poetry can have on the evils of racism. Czeslaw Milosz, a Lithuanian poet, has asked the question,"What is poetry, which does not save nations and peoples?" heaney contends that poetry, or art in general for that matter, helps the fight against injustice by strengthening the readers' sense of personal dignity, the sense of human solidarity. and he's right.

it's true that many people consider writers to be merely spectators; writing itself is not seen as an action. and it's true that for some people, poetry for its own sake is enough (this mainly concerns the language poets, who deal more with form and sound than with content at times. they're interesting in their right, but not really applicable here.). i have always thought that part of the job of the artist is to hold a sort of two-way mirror up to the human race; show the evils to which we as people can sink but also the fact that we all have the chance to transcend mere circumstance. to show people both as they are and as they can be. in what better way can we help to fight injusctice?

william heyen, in one of his articles about the environment, said that if poetry cannot be found to have an immediate impact for change, then perhaps it should be put on sabbatical until the change has been effected. in some ways he's right; if we manage to kill ourselves in the next hundred years, poetry will be the least of our worries. philosophy, art, even love will be a moot point. but i don't think poetry needs a sabbatical; i think it's time to consider what poetry really does in terms of change. in speaking to one person, or a hundred people, or a thousand... to give them a chance to think about life a little differently, even for five minutes, is to possibly help them change their lives a little at a time.

in 1840, alexis de tocqueville predicted in his survey of american culture, Democracy in America, that american poetry would be concerned with the inner soul. i'm not sure that applies only to american poets; i'm fairly certain that all art is to some degree or another concerned with the universal, the inner soul, and the path to both. the thing about this kind of writing is, it's possible to look inside oneself to find the truths of humanity, what tocqueville called "the obscurer recesses of the human heart," and "the hidden nerve."

in the most intensely personal poem there is the chance for a reader to see him-or-herself in the heart of someone Other. there is the chance to provoke empathy. to show the common threads of people everywhere. i've already written about how i feel about the word "tolerance," but i think in poetry there is a chance to build respect and reverence for all persons. if i didn't, i'd have stopped writing a long time ago.

-beatpoetgrrl

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