Why I’ll persevere with reading poetry
Image: Colin Poellot Written in Stone via PhotoPin (licence)
A good friend once told me that the only poems she’ll read or listen to are those in songs. She’s hardly alone.
However, it turns out reading poetry may be more important than we think.
Have you ever read a poem that’s left you with a sense of unease or ambiguity because you found it obscure or open-ended? Or because you felt you didn’t quite get a message that you should’ve gotten? John Coleman pointed out that having to interpret opaqueness into something meaningful and understandable enriches one’s capacity to simplify complexity into an idea or problem. In turn, this capacity informs the ability to communicate that problem to others – the beginning to problem-solving.
In her book What poetry brings to business, Oxford academic Clare Morgan posited that because poetry asks readers to unpack and consider text carefully in a context where there are multiple possible answers, it encourages a ‘different mindset’ that relies on intuitive and associative thinking rather than logical and linear thinking. This raises the possibility that a mindset more comfortable with multiplicity and uncertainty may be better equipped for the wicked challenges of an increasingly interconnected world.
Morgan also found that reading poetry stimulates innovative thinking. Figuring out poetic meaning not only enhances flexibility but taps into a domain deeper than analytic reasoning. Indeed, compared with reading prose, reading poetry appears to access different parts of the brain that are associated with flexibility and intuition.
Finally, because poems can be read an infinite number of ways, they remind us that meaning is multifaceted and impermanent; that what we have adopted is something we need to constantly examine and revise in our own assumptions. Not only does this make us more malleable, it also makes us more empathetic and respectful of others’ views.
I read a fair bit, both for a living and for the love of it. But I still find poetry hard going. More often than I’ll admit, I’ve found poems inscrutable, frustrating and unsatisfying. But I will chance this medium again and again because, once in a while, the language, the imagery, the cadence, something, reels me in. Those poems that I’ve managed to understand have hooked me faster and deeper than anything else I’ve read.
The influential psychologist William James is attributed with saying ‘We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep’. Perhaps, as Ruth Padel observed, that’s the most compelling reason of all for reading poetry: it offers us instant connection to our humanity.
