In Praise of Poetry
By Eliza Browning
As we wrap up National Poetry Month, an annual celebration of poetry held every April, I’ve been thinking about the power of poetry to resonate with rea
ders in both universal and unexpected ways: how a single impactful poem can capture a specific emotion or experience and stay with you for a lifetime. What makes a poem impactful is often far more specific and less straightforward than prose, making reading poetry a deeply personal experience. I’m often drawn to poetry that features a vivid, striking, and unexpected use of language, articulates or conveys something universal about the human experience, and functions like a self-contained narrative that leaves you with something new at its end. Passages from these three poems have stayed with me for years, although I highly recommend taking the time to read the poems in their entirety to experience their full power.
“Having a Coke with You” by Frank O’Hara (1960)
“Having a Coke with you
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles”
One of Frank O’Hara’s most famous poems, “Having a Coke with You,” is beloved for good reason: its transformation of an ordinary moment into one of love, connection, and excitement. O’Hara’s poems have an uncannily immersive quality; despite their specific setting of 1950s and 60s New York, they still feel as fresh and relevant as ever because of their ability to include you in the specific moments and conversations shared by O’Hara’s group of friends. His poems are incredibly successful at capturing joyous moments of ordinary existence, juxtaposing common observations like his partner’s “love for yoghurt” with the unexpected imagery of “a tree breathing through its spectacles.”
“Meditation at Lagunitas” by Robert Hass (1979)
“All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.”
Robert Hass’s poetry is especially skilled at evoking the beauty of the natural world, specifically the landscape of northern California where he lives. Beyond his interest in ecopoetry, his poems often focus on small details such as the woodpecker and blackberry in “Meditation at Lagunitas” to examine their place in the wider world. This poem serves as an interrogation of language in itself, proposing that “a word is elegy to what it signifies.” Hass captures the power of poetry to endure beyond a specific moment, making this poem from an early collection especially adept at transcending time and place.
“The Glass Essay” by Anne Carson (1995)
“It is as if I could dip my hand down
into time and scoop up
blue and green lozenges of April heat
a year ago in another country.
I can feel that other day running underneath this one
like an old videotape”
“The Glass Essay” is a 36-page poetic sequence exploring loss, memory, and the nature of poetry that opens Anne Carson’s 1995 book Glass, Irony, and God. Despite its length, it feels compulsively readable, juxtaposing the life of Emily Brontë, who wrote poetry she felt no one would ever read, with the poet’s own experience of a devastating breakup. I especially enjoy this passage for its ability to simply but beautifully capture the passage of time and the experience of loss. Carson memorably portrays the past as another country, one that might feel close but which we can never return to.