0:00  
So poetry should capture something about the human voice, something about the way we feel. According to Dickinson, it should also make you feel like the top of your head has been blown off. I was hoping for a more definitive answer. So I thought I'd reframe the question. I asked Michael lista, formerly the poetry critic for the National Post, what he thinks the ultimate purpose of poetry is. Michael's are into books of his own poems. But these days, he spends most of his time doing investigative reporting.

0:30  
I believe very deeply what, who wrote, which is that poetry makes nothing happen. That sort of has two meanings, like the first is the sort of like the sort of, sort of sighing, resigned feeling that like a poem can't do anything. Poetry makes nothing happen also has like another meaning, which is that poetry has the ability to introduce nothingness to a world of so much ness, you know, like it creates a space where the gift is that nothing occurs there.

1:08  
But of course, you also need to remember that Odin wrote those after having written a poem called Spain 1937, where he took the very strong side and the Spanish Civil War, and he was trying to make something happen, right. So I think I think it's slightly more complex. It makes us think about things in that and us thinking about reflecting on things eventually will make things happen. I suppose there's a kind of disenchantment, perhaps not with the lack of poetry's power, but I suspect more with a lot of the kind of propaganda stick poetry that came out.

1:43  
It sounds to me like this whole question of what wh Auden meant, when he said poetry makes nothing happened, actually gets a larger issue, which is the connection between poetry and politics.

1:55  
I think that

1:57  
especially in Canada, one of the one of the things that the poetry community is always really concerned about is, is the question of like, the sort of social utility of a poem, if you really believe in a social issue, or you really believe in like, a, like a policy that needs to be changed. The least efficacious way to achieve that is by reading the change it's really good at making is in people's hearts

2:28  
I think that any art when it when it gets kind of taken over by politics it's it's tricky because then the message becomes the only thing and then the art is kind of secondary right and for me what I'm saying and how I'm saying it are completely

2:49  
intertwined.

3:00  
Duty Free by no everything under Hudson or forever is good liquor with his good is CLOUD NINE forever, but in the zoo Express relay if by nuance and wine life and news under $20 or Life is good under $20 unless the stylish factory and wine store until who's who in the wine store, but for you find in the stylish relay or a blonde and a brunette and a redhead and a ginger or a Hey, a girl that kind of looks like you with a phone that looks like yours.

3:32  
That last clip was Sachiko, reciting one of her poems called airport boomers a clusterfuck. From her book, get me out of here. All this talk about politics and poetry is fine and dandy. But I have a feeling that this is the kind of conversation that only poets actually care about. My impression is that poetry gets bashed on perhaps more than other art forms do for being too frivolous,

3:55  
I think because it's difficult, like the whole idea of poetry is that you're disrupting the way you normally receive language. You don't approach it the way you would approach a piece of music. And just like do it like this or do I not like this? Does it move me Does it not move me you approach it, you're like, Okay, now, you have to find underline all the metaphors and and then count the beats. You know, like, that's not how poetry is meant to be read. So I think that there's like a lot of kind of distrust and dismissal of, of poetry to begin with.

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