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"Why poetry?"

Thus read the first line of Critic's Take in the NYT Book section in Sunday's paper.  It's a question I've thought about several times over the last few years as I began writing poetry myself.  My simple answer over the past few years was simply this:  "because I can say some things in poetry that I can't say any other way."

Daniel Halpern's NYT column sought answers from other writers -- i.e., real writers, not fakers like me.  This is what he recorded:

The poet W.S. Merwin once said:  'Poetry addresses individuals in their most intimate, private, frightened and elated moments . . . because it comes closer than any other art form to addressing what cannot be said.'

Halpern continued with a series of questions, including --

• When you're looking for a poem to read at a memorial service, what is it you're looking for?
• And why are you looking for it in a poem?
• Do you imagine that it is in poetry that you'll find something you could not have said yourself?
• And when you find the right poem, what have you discovered?
• What do you hear?
• What's been said?
• And what do you imagine others are going to hear? 

As Louise Gluck wrote to Halpern, "the books [of poetry] may not sell well, but neither are they given away or thrown away.  They tend, more than other books, to fall apart in their owners' hands."

And Emily Dickinson once wrote:

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.  If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.  These are the only ways I know it.  Is there any other way?