29. Today's Poems Are Tomorrow's Language

Poetry is powerful because it takes us beyond the reaches of our everyday language. A poem is a text that points at something outside of it, something for which words are not enough.

The more we use language, the more we find ourselves trapped inside it, unable to find the words to express what we want to say, and as such, unable to communicate our meaning to others. To escape this prison, we write poems — tricks of language that indicate the thing in question without ever naming it. This trickery is not always successful, which makes writing effective poetry difficult.

When a poem succeeds, it lifts you up to a new and special place. When it fails, it is nothing but empty words that leave you where you started. To complicate matters further, a poem that resonates for me might do nothing for you, and a poem that successfully transports you to the heavens might fail to move me even an inch.

It is the rare poem that is universally successful. But such success tends to result in a strange fate. For often, the universally successful poem ends up being totally absorbed. It is consumed and digested so thoroughly that it becomes part of the language itself.

Consequently, an old poem that was once universally successful might now seem trite or obvious. We can no longer feel the full power it once possessed. The language has grown to encompass it, and it can no longer take us anywhere new.