Poetry is useless.
It gets nothing done.
builds no houses, makes no sales, raises no taxes,
organizes no cities into grids of streets and avenues,
cannot drive I-94 from Chicago to Detroit,
clears no snow from a winter storm,
fixes no faucets, removes no tumors,
sooths no baby’s existential crisis.
The right poem, however, if it’s heavy enough,
can be thrown to a deep-sea diver thrashing
about in the shallows of immediacy.
If the poem is caught like a lead life ring,
the diver will gain gravitas and sink deeper
into fathoms of the present moment’s past
stored in his and history’s muscle memory.
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Building this poem: Poems happen at the intersection of fluid flow and careful construction. Choices arise and
decisions are made along the way. For instance, in the last line of the third stanza of this poem, I did not want
to use the gender specific pronoun ‘his.‘ Knowing that women have profoundly deep insights and being an
advocate of gender equality, I looked for a more inclusive way to organize the last line. I tried using ‘her’ instead
of ‘his.‘ The sound of ‘her’ disrupted the musicality of the line. Since the poem was not about gender equality but
about the power of a poem to take us deeper into life, I returned to ‘his’.
The idea for this poem was set loose in my mind many years ago when I read the American poet Marianne Moore’s
(1887-1972) poem Poetry.