The time within: Editorial on the enduring power of poetry in an impatient world

Is poetry the best reading matter for the present time? The recipient of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, Anne Carson, has said that poetry is probably more useful than prose nowadays because it is “faster”. Everybody is in a hurry and poetry is suitable because it is brief. The poet, classicist, translator and essayist added that she excepted Homer, because Homer is not brief. Which could be taken to mean that all other epic poetry, or anything on the epic scale, would not suit as reading matter today. Ms Carson, however, while being hesitant to call herself a poet, is unique in blending all genres together in her work: poetry can become memoir, which can shade into translation or criticism that turns into fiction, while within the work the classical and the modern blend and separate, as though in dialogue. This, too, is poetry, for literature that constantly seeks to shape something new, something beyond formal genres, is engaged, like poetry, to push words towards the elusive edges of experience.

Elsewhere, Ms Carson had said that a poem, when it works, is “an action of the mind captured on a page”. That seems to give poems a defined boundary, a desirable brevity that might be more ‘useful’ at present than pages of prose for which people have no time. It is not just that people are in a hurry because life is much busier than it was, but also because their attention span has been reduced by the constant exposure to social media and push-button entertainment. Research shows that on an average people stay focused on a digital task for 40 to 47 seconds before changing their screen or checking notifications. Interruptions by phones and messages occur constantly, and many people habitually pick up the phone after brief intervals. Increased stimuli also keep distracting attention. It is not easy to imagine that they would — except scholars and students — pick up a book of poetry to pass the time because poems are briefer than prose. Perhaps the boundary that is implied in Ms Carson’s “an action of the mind” may help.

But do poems have such a boundary? The paradox here is that even if a poem is brief, when it works, it resonates beyond the boundary of its formal appearance and its reading time on the page. The time of the poem is hidden in its words and its silences; it pushes towards wells of experience; it cannot be captured ‘briefly’. Its ‘manageable’ size disguises also the possibilities of danger: what emerges may be politically subversive or suggestive of other transgressions. It can compel the reader into new modes of thought. And that takes time. The greatest art is unsettling — the response to it is never within the expected temporal frame. The disturbing, thought-provoking quality in poetry does not allow the experience of reading a poem to be brief, however few its lines. Ms Carson may have been too optimistic about readers today: readers of poetry remain as few as they ever were. Or did she mean that it would force readers to pause?