Thoughts on Poetry

For many thousands of years language has stored up not just a map of all the places the human mind and heart can go but an instinct, a hunger for those routes and places – like a dog’s hunger to go running and sniffing.  Poetry is language off the leash, exercising its muscle and intricate skills.  After a lot of dull usage – political speeches, sales pitches, literary theory – it can hardly restrain itself and it pulls us along into the fresh air and strange twilight colours, into sudden memories of our early lives.  It can take us to the limits of our world, into griefs and ecstasies, even out into madness and non-human experiences, if we want it to and it’s in the mood.

Poetry is an ageless ancient guide we can team up with to discover vantage points that reveal the broad landscape we’ve been living in blindly, piecemeal; with its keen senses it brings the world to life for us with more intensity than we’ve ever known; it surprises us with the energies in wild things, including our dreams and passions; it elicits from deep within us our appetite for play, adventure, love and invention, and our capacity to be at home in the ever-changing world as it really is.

John Steffler
21 January, 2008

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