Poetry and what?

What is this ever so enigmatic phrase “The Common Good?”

And what, even, is poetry?

Okay, that one’s easy...right?

Poetry is the harnessing of ideas, putting ideas to work by way of carefully chosen words, punctuation, line breaks, etc. It is images and metaphors. Poetry can be stories, conversations, abstractions. Poetry can be confessional, can be didactic.

According to Gwendolyn MacEwan,

Poetry has got nothing to do with poetry.
Poetry is how the air goes green before thunder,
is the sound you make when you come, and
why you live and how you bleed, and

The sound you make or don’t make when you die.

Now, I’m aware of the impossibility of pinning down words with ostensive definitions, poetry especially, so I cite our dear friend Mirriam Webster as just another example of how we define poetry:

Main Entry: po·et·ry
Function: noun
Date: 14th century
1 a: metrical writing : verse b: the productions of a poet : poems
2: writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm
3 a: something likened to poetry especially in beauty of expression b: poetic quality or aspect .

With poetry being all these things and more, the questions still remain, what is the common good and what does Poetry have to do with it?

I’ll leave those questions to you to think about, as I myself am still pondering their plethora of possible answers.

At any rate, when I made my way out to CMU this morning to see Rhea Tregebov and Gregory Scofield read their poetry I was hoping they’d shed some light on this subject, seeing as the title of the event was Poetry and the Common Good. Instead I was treated simply to a traditional reading that saw Gregory pouring out passionate poems that bounce between English and Cree with a most amazing sense of rythm and cadence, and Rhea reading old and new poems and one, entitled “The Gardens of the Antarctic,” a poetic sci-fi dystopia about what it might be like if we consume ourselves to extinction (a speculation that doesn’t seem all that far-fetched anymore).

Maybe poetry is by its very nature acting towards a common good.

...poetry...is always political and subversive: it uses our foremost technological tool, the ur-tool that is language, against itself, against its tendency to be the supreme analytic and organizing instrument. In poetry, language is always a singer as well as a thinker; a lover as well as an engineer. It discovers and delights in its own physical being, as though it were an otter or a raven rather than simply the vice president in charge of making sense.

-Don McKay

Maybe poetry is by its very nature pushing us toward a common good, causing us to rethink normal and see that there might actually be a different way of going about things. Imagine that.

****

Brandon James Bertram is an English/Creative Writing student at the University of Winnipeg. He reads, writes, rides bikes, and drinks coffee.