Bob Schwartz

I forgot that 2023 is the Year of Poetry. I should remember, because it was me who declared it back in December. You probably didn’t notice.

Poetry seems very distant from the events and concerns of the past weeks, and from the weeks and months to come. But it shouldn’t, not for me, not for anyone.

Here are a couple of celebrated writers talking about the role of poets. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to read some poems instead of news reports.

What is [the poet’s] function? Certainly it is not to lead people out of the confusion in which they find themselves. Nor is it, I think, to comfort them while they follow their readers to and fro. I think that his function is to make his imagination theirs and that he fulfills himself only as he sees his imagination become the light in the minds of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.
Wallace Stevens, The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words (1941)

The pessimism of the creative person is not decadence but a mighty passion for the redemption of man. While the poet entertains he continues to search for eternal truths, for the essence of being. In his own fashion he tries to solve the riddle of time and change, to find an answer to suffering, to reveal love in the very abyss of cruelty and injustice. Strange as these words may sound I often play with the idea that when all the social theories collapse and wars and revolutions leave humanity in utter gloom, the poet—whom Plato banned from his Republic—may rise up to save us all.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nobel Prize Lecture (1978)