what is poetry?, featuring jarita davis

a series in partnership with the Massachusetts Poetry Festival

Jarita Davis, on 'What Is Poetry?'

This is the fourth installment in a series brought to you by Read Write Poem in partnership with the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, which is being held Oct. 15-18 in Lowell and various cities across Massachusetts. Visit the organization’s website for a complete schedule of events, to watch videos of poets performing at the 2008 festival, for ticket information and more.

For this series, featured readers at the festival were asked to answer the question, “What is poetry?” Here is Jarita Davis’ response.

What is poetry?
There are probably as many answers to this question as there are poets, and I’m always interested in hearing their responses. Speaking only for myself, I believe that poetry is the opposite of small talk, which is a way to interact with other people without really connecting with them. In small talk, we only scrape the surface of each other’s lives while keeping a safe, polite distance from any substance. Poetry is intimacy. If a poem is talking about the weather, to be effective, it’d better be talking about more than just the weather.

Which is not to say that a poem ought to have an agenda or send a message. A good poem is often more about connecting with its readers rather than instructing them. Instead of sending messages, some of the best poems come from listening for messages from within.

In a poetry workshop that I led last spring, I told the participants that while we may have a lot of things inside us we want to say, there’s even more inside us that wants to be heard. In poetry, the writer and the reader can discover these things together.

At its best, poetry can be a way of tapping into something within yourself and discovering how it connects you with others and the world around you and within you.

Jarita Davis has a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and was the writer in residence at the Nantucket Historical Association. She has received fellowships from the Mellon Mayes program, Cave Canem, Hedgebrook and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. In addition, she was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Travel Research Grant, a Neiheisel Phi Beta Kappa Award and a grant from the Louisiana Division of the Arts. Her work has appeared in the Southwestern Review, Historic Nantucket, Cave Canem Anthologies, Crab Orchard Review, Plainsongs and Tuesday; An Art Project. Most recently her manuscript As if Returning Home was chosen by Yusef Komunyakaa as a finalist for the Cave Canem First Book Prize. For more about Davis’ work go to www.jaritadavis.com.

Davis is hosting the Cave Canem poetry reading at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival Saturday, Oct. 17, from 3-4:30 p.m. at St. Anne’s Church, 8 Kirk Street in Lowell. Learn more about the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival by visiting the festival’s site.