Poetry is a salve for the soul

A beautiful perspective on what poetry can do for us by Leila Chatti:

I have always put my faith in poetry, have come to it for answers. (I have never understood the shame, in poets, in admitting this.) And there was no one else, then, to turn to—the world closed, I lived inside a room of books. This is not metaphor.

Sequestered in my personal library, wildered by grief, I looked to the poets who had all my life guided me. Those women who, like oracles, spoke the true thing. Godmouthed. Who had seen what was and would be. And said it strange.

Oracle: from the Latin orare. To pray or to speak. Surely they lived as I did. Needing to write poems, in order to do both at the same time.

I approached their poems like the prophecies of oracles—something to be deciphered, the message cryptic. The oracle at Delphi was originally a girl, then later a woman over the age of fifty. Her title: Pythia. My mind sees this and instinctively reads it as code, rearranging its letters: Sylvia Plath. It was with her work I began, first woman poet I encountered on my way to becoming one. Poet who spoke the unsayable thoughts I could not name and had believed were mine alone.

Poet: from the Greek poietes. Maker.

I came back to her poems because I was failing. When my body could not create a child who survived my body, my mind could not create a poem that did. Grief unmakes. The world, the word. Because I approached it desperately, language fled from me. Language is like an animal, wary of fear. Say each word was a bird—alighting briefly, out of reach and then gone again. Or, when caught forcibly, it wrestled fiercely against my grip, then died from the strain of its efforts.

It’s also a wonderful article on what it is to write and be a writer.