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A weblog from the editors of Linebreak

The regulars

Ash Bowen's poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Blackbird, and Black Warrior Review, among other publications. He lives and works in Texarkana, AR.

Jennifer Jabaily's poetry has appeared in Mannequin Envy and Fickle Muses. She's a second-year MFA student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

Ashley Anna McHugh is a third-year MFA student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Measure, DIAGRAM and Memorious as well as other publications.

Johnathon Williams's poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2009, the Pebble Lake Review, and Unsplendid. He lives in Fayetteville, AR, with his wife and daughters.

Why poetry matters

By Johnathon Williams on Nov 19, 2009

Writing for Harper’s, Denis Donoghue reviews Jay Parini’s Why Poetry Matters, and provides his own explanation in the process:

Reading a poem entails, to a special degree, the act of paying attention; we are required to concentrate our minds, not only to the extent we do habitually on words as they pass in ordinary life but as we are impelled to do on words in the intricacies, frictions, and evasions of lyric form. That so much in contemporary life encourages us to do otherwise — to accept things as they are, whether for the sake of ignorance or convenience — suggests, finally, why it is that poetry matters. Although Coleridge may have been referring specifically to poetry when he devised the phrase, might “a more continuous and equal attention” offer not just a way of reading but of living as well?

One comment // attention, why poetry matters

Discussion

BY john guzlowski on Nov 19 2009 (#1)

Poetry for me slows time. The poet has found some kind of way of taking a period of time and freezing it, layering it, penetrating and thickening it.

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” for example, takes place in about 3-4 minutes of time. Reading it and zoning into it, I suddenly find myself in 3-4 minutes that some how have taken on the experiential fullness of an afternoon or a weekend.

I step back from the poem with a pop! Saying wow, that was heavy.

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