Readers of New Grub Street will be all too aware of how important poetry is to me and to the life of this Substack account. If you are a poetry lover, it is easy to assume that everyone gets it, and if you’re a bit poetry-phobic it’s easy to question why it matters. In a forthcoming series of posts, I want to explore why poetry still matters even if we are not particularly given to reading it, and to share some of the functions that poetry fulfils in our world. My case will be that poetry is categorically subcultural, but that it also has important counter-cultural work to do, especially in a world that is changing as rapidly as ours.
In terms of counter-culture, I want to suggest that poetry goes against the grain of some of the assumptions our world carries and provides ballast and stability in unseen and unique ways. This function can be expressed in the following three ways:
Poetry is slow in a fast world
Poetry is true in a false world
Poetry is local in a global world
It is to the first of these that we turn in this article.
Poetry is slow in a fast world
There can be no doubt that we are living in a fast-paced culture, whose capacity for constant acceleration can be frightening. The rate of change and our expected speed of response to multiple always-on channels that crave our attention is dizzying and depressing all at once. We live in an honour-shame culture where remaining on top of one’s digital life is viewed as a metric of utility, perhaps even of integrity.
Few of us can fully quantify the rate of change our daily lives are absorbing, nor the simultaneously beneficial and detrimental effects that it is having on us. The World in Data (accessed via the World Economic Forum) charted the rate of technological changes across the history of humankind and (even if you want to quibble with the length of the timeline at either end) it makes for salutary reading. This chart lays out just how rapidly things are changing all around us:
The upward curve of human ‘progress’ is astonishing, and it is no wonder that those of us living through this era often find ourselves with the cognitive equivalent of altitude sickness.
This experience can leave us feeling harried and hurried all by itself, but the way that we absorb and process information has also changed dramatically. Our understanding is now conditioned by visual and sensory experiences in a way that none of our human forbears would recognise. We absorb the news, we come to core convictions, we express our love, we form political opinions, we draw the lines between friends and enemies, at an unnerving rate of speed. This experience has not made us more competent or agile, but has simply ensured that snap judgments and hastily processed data form the core of how we live. The leakage of this mindset and these reflexes into the political realm is new to us, but it does not promise to be short-lived. Few would argue that any of this is intrinsically good.
The beautiful, bewildering and lasting pace of poetry
It is into this frenzied space that poetry intrudes with its almost paralysing insistence on slow and repeated reading, with its cumbersome gait, with its verbal density and emotional intensity. Poetry is slow in a fast world, it is built for contemplation, not speed. It deliberates and equivocates; it holds the universe in two minds at all times, and it simply will not hurry up. Poetry won’t be pushed onto the bullet train of our modern trajectory, it will not reduce itself to a character count (apart from it feels like it!), and it doesn’t sell itself well in the ever-updating market of social media feeds.
Poetry is like an infant who insists on stopping to look at a worm on the footpath while his or her parents are trying to hurry them to nursery school. Poetry can be a pain in the proverbial, with its ponderous and pathological focus on the exterior and interior worlds that humans inhabit. Poetry is just plain slow. All of this is exactly why it matters.
It is hard to think of another medium which is so culturally resistant. It is hard to conceive of any genre of human reading and writing that is so sealed from the incessant here and now need to be there and then. Whether we read poetry or not, it is fulfilling its human (and, perhaps, divine) function of being slow in our world. As human history expands and contracts, as the waves of war and work wash up on the shore of how we live day by day, as the motors and mechanisms of discourse and relationship become more frictional and heated, poetry will be pausing, taking stock, writing it all down. In generations to come, it will be the slow work of poetry that is remembered and valued, not the hot-take, hardboiled, gotcha glam that tech pushes at us 24/7. It is not the botanist’s nor industrialist’s view of the 18th-century English landscape that has stuck with us after all of this time, but Wordsworth’s economically daft focus on daffodils.
Joining the resistance
This objective truth can be subjectively enjoyed by us. To determine to read poetry is to mount an act of resistance against our hurried culture, it is to understand that some things, like love and life, are wasted by haste, and that meaning often does not simply sit on the surface of things. In my (normally) weekly post on accessing poetry here on New Grub Street, I have appropriated a phrase from Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal, ‘Close and Slow’. The close reading that poetry requires, its very human tendency to insist on going beyond formal niceties before opening itself to intimacy, its privileging of things that can get scuttled under the wheels of ‘progress’, is so important.
The pace of poetry is not an impediment but an empowerment; it makes us hear the clock tick, it cannot be overlaid with the consumption of other media while we engage with it, and it won’t carry us on the dopamine hit of plot. Instead, it is human, it is conversational and, by consequence it is confrontational of all of the nonsense of our non-stop getting and spending, consuming and absorbing.
One of our greatest acts of cultural rebellion is to give poetry a place, and let poetry set the pace, in our lives. It may take time for us to learn its language, its meaning may ultimately evade us, but almost every slow thing in this fast world is worth taking time to examine, appropriate and enjoy.
This is fantastic, Andrew. Thanks for writing this!