How poetry can lift us from our troubled times

When you learned recently that Joyce Sutphen, who teaches creative writing and literature at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, was named Minnesota poet laureate, did you yawn and think: So what? Is this really news?

In this political and economic context, honoring poetry might seem like indulgence. Many of us can't find jobs. We don't know whether democracy will prevail in the Middle East -- or even here at home. Our state and national legislatures can barely agree to keep the lights on.

Maybe the thought of poetry reminds you of the dentist's drill. You've tried giving it your level best, but it tastes like juice concentrate drunk straight from the can: It's too much, too fast, too potent.

Why not dilute it with transitions and sentence structure, you wonder? Turn it into prose that we can digest with less trouble?

But its concentrated form is exactly why it matters, and why news of Sutphen's appointment is important.

The relationship between poetry and other forms of writing is like that of the competitive dive to a 200-meter freestyle swim. Both happen in water. Both require power, precision, muscularity.

But the poet twists language and image into beauty, keeping movement and energy contained within a tight space.

Isn't this exactly what is required of us when we have to express what we need, why we care and what we're willing to die for to someone who will give us 15 seconds, not 15 minutes, of her time?

Isn't it the skill we need when we must express our heart to someone leaving on the next plane to Afghanistan?

If our legislators are to learn how to communicate and work together again, it will be artists, not professional partisans, standing at the board holding the chalk.

The artist shows us how history and politics affect our interior lives. The poet Wendell Berry called public suffering the compound of "almost infinite private sufferings." We can't address the one unless we're willing to address the other.

Art addresses public suffering by showing me how you suffer, which shows me how I suffer. I fell in love with poetry the first time I saw my father cry. Usually he clenched his jaw like a granite wall and hid his heart behind it. But one day while listening to a song, tears began rolling down his face.

That was when I understood the power of art to revolutionize the human interior. It does what fiction writer and essayist Ann Pancake calls re-sacralizing the world. It gives us the dream forward. At its best, art makes us fall back in love with the world.

If I desire such a reorganizing of public and private, where do I begin? The same place a poem begins. When asked where that is, Sutphen clapped her hands, bounced on her chair and said, "I know! It starts where it starts."

It starts with the first word.

So maybe this fall, give poetry another shot. Maybe begin with a book of poems by our new poet laureate. My favorite is "Naming the Stars."

Then look for the single poem or the single line that raises the flesh on your arms and the hair on the back of your neck. You will have just found the imprint of your own mind in the mind of the one who wrote the poem.

If even one poem in a hundred does this, it's enough to change your world.

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Jennifer Imsande, of Nisswa, Minn., is the former associate director of the Masters Program in Advocacy and Political Leadership at the University of Minnesota Duluth.