JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

I don’t go to poetry readings if I can help it. Usually I become violent and imagine ripping out the poet’s larynx so he can never defile the atmosphere with his pretentiousness again. Or I burst out laughing, which is rude and I try not to be rude. Musical accompaniment dulls the pain, though not by much. But I do read poetry, I like some of it, and I have a few verses stored in my memory. Sometimes when something happens to me, a line from a poem I thought I’d forgotten will pop unbidden into my head, and suddenly the experience makes more sense to me. I figure that’s what poetry is for, at least in my case.

Before he died this year, the philosopher Richard Rorty wrote: “. . .I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends. Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human — farther removed from the beasts — than those with poorer ones; individual men and women are more fully human when their memories are amply stocked with verses.”